Weirdhouse Cinema Rewind: Horror Rises From the Tomb

There’s no keeping THIS occult power couple down! In this classic episode of Weirdhouse Cinema, watch as Spanish horror icons Paul Naschy and Helga Liné spice things up across the centuries in 1973’s “Horror Rises From the Tomb.” (originally published 07/15/2022)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema. Rewind. This is Rob Lamb.

Speaker 2 (00:09):
And this is Joe McCormick, and ooh, what horrors we
have in store for you. In fact, the horror is
rising from the tomb in this older episode of Weird
House Cinema. It originally published July fifteenth, twenty twenty two.
It's Paul Nashy time.

Speaker 1 (00:23):
Yeah, this is one of my favorites. This is one
of those films that's like, I wish I could watch
it again for the first time and do it on
Weird House Cinema again for the first time. So at
any rate, it's a great movie to revisit and hope
you enjoy our discussion of it.

Speaker 3 (00:41):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your mind, A production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:45):
Yeah, so I just finished rewatching it and made it
to the end where there's a really good stunt fall.
I don't know if you caught that, when the headless
body of the Warlock rolls down the steps and it's
obviously not a dum me, it's a stunt man. Oh yeah,
headless suit. He's getting the legs going all of this,
so we obviously can't see.

Speaker 1 (01:06):
I think the effects in this movie are better than
they should have been in some regards, Like I like
the scenes where there's the lifting of the head. You know,
I'm something of a well I wouldn't say I'm a connoisewer,
but I pay a lot of attention whenever there's a

(01:26):
beheading and there's a head being handled in a film,
because I'm always curious, like, how good is it going
to look? How are they going to do it? Are
they gonna do the dummy head? Are they going to
do like, you know, shooting an actual head the right
way and making it look like it's detached. And they
did a mix here that mostly worked pretty well. I've
seen it look rougher in more expensive movies.

Speaker 2 (01:50):
Well, it depends what you mean by well. I do agree, though,
I found I think literally every scene with the severed
head hilarious.

Speaker 1 (01:58):
Well, it is inherent there's something inherently hilarious about it too,
especially given the seriousness with which it is approached.

Speaker 2 (02:06):
Did we already start the episode?

Speaker 4 (02:07):
Hey?

Speaker 2 (02:08):
Hello, are you listening?

Speaker 1 (02:09):
Oh hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema.

Speaker 2 (02:11):
My name is Rob Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick.

Speaker 1 (02:14):
Yeah. We were just talking a little about beheadings and
movies disembodied heads, the living head off the beheaded, because
that's what we have in today's film, in nineteen seventy
three's Horror Rises from the Tomb.

Speaker 2 (02:29):
Rob, I feel like this is the third or fourth
early seventies Spanish horror movie you have picked. What's got
you going down this road? How'd you end up in
seventies Spain?

Speaker 1 (02:43):
Oh, there's just something about this whole realm of horror filmmaking.
There's just some really there's some great stuff here, and
there's a lot of great stuff that I haven't seen.
So it's exciting to me. Because the film we're talking
about here to today, Horror Rises from the Tomb he
is considered a classic of seventy Spanish horror, Like this
is a this film is a big deal. So I

(03:05):
had not seen it previously, so it was it was,
it was one I was it was interested in. I
was reading the synopsis and I was like, all right,
as long as this one sort of stays within the parameters,
this could be the film for this week, and lo
and behold it was.

Speaker 2 (03:20):
So I didn't know anything about this movie going in,
but I was I was certainly tempted when you when
you shared with me, I think a user review you
came across on some website that essentially made it seem
like this may in fact have also been an ego
trip for a particular writer slash actor.

Speaker 1 (03:38):
Yeah, there are accounts of Paul Nashy the star and
writer here and in his his his ego. I have
I have seen that written about, and yeah, this is uh.
I ran across this, this particular write up on Letterboxed
letterboxed dot com. That's l E T T E R
b O x D. That's a great website to go

(03:59):
too if you want listings of films, lists of films,
and hey, we are on there. We have an account
under the user named weird House, and you can go
there and see all the films that we've talked about
in a nice visual display. And I also have links
to the podcast episodes on there. But anyway, this particular review, yeah,
a user by the name of their name is spelled

(04:21):
like Lou Lou, but then it says rhymes with Wao,
so I guess it's Lao. Lal writes when Paul Nashi
wrote this movie about medieval Paul Nashi getting decapitated because
of alleged Satanist practices. He knew it was really about
the executioners being jealous of medieval Paul Nashi's good looks
slash him being irresistible to women everywhere. When it came

(04:43):
time for Paul Nashi to write a hero into the
story to save everyone and their wives from the clutches
of medieval Paul Nashi, he conjured up dreamy, present day
hunk Paul Nashi. He knew that even if Dreamy Paul
Nashy wouldn't be able to defeat medieval Paul Nashi, he
would at least be recognized as they hear h Dreamy
Paul Nashi really is.

Speaker 2 (05:02):
I'd say that's about right. So this movie was not
directed by Paul Nashi, but written by Paul Nashi and
starring Paul Nashi in at least three different roles.

Speaker 1 (05:12):
That's right now. I think that I would critique this
this this this review is hilarious and I love it,
but it's not one accurate in terms of what we
get out of the Paul Nashi's and we'll get into
that the different Paul Nashi characters. There's really one dreamy
Paul Nashi character in this film, and he's pretty magical.

Speaker 2 (05:33):
So I was watching this movie on a streaming service
that is supported by AD breaks, and I was deeply
intrigued by the fact that the movie has major themes
of a floating severed warlockhead dripping neck blood on things,
including like a painting in the process of being painted,
and so so we'd have the head, it would dribble

(05:56):
some neck blood, and then we would cut to commercial
and the commercials are all for paper towels and other
cleaning products. Is this a coincidence or has AD targeting
got this good, like they can detect the contents of
the film and adjust adds accordingly.

Speaker 1 (06:13):
I don't know. I mean, you know, when stains are
at their worst, such as from dripping heads, you need
a quality paper towel.

Speaker 2 (06:23):
The other thing about the streaming service that I thought
was funny was that it said this movie is rated
TV fourteen despite it being absolutely wall to wall severed heads,
gratuitous nudity and dripping blood all over the place.

Speaker 1 (06:36):
That's right.

Speaker 2 (06:37):
Maybe maybe that's like euro rating standards.

Speaker 1 (06:39):
I don't know. Maybe, so, yeah, this is not a
film for the children, though I have read that there
is a quote unquote clothed cut of this, So they
might have shot some alternate scenes in which various characters
are clothed instead of in various states of nudy, but
it would be an entirely different film that way, So
I'm not sure I can recommend that even if you

(07:01):
can find that cut.

Speaker 2 (07:02):
Another thing I will say about my experience of watching
The Horror Rises from the Tomb is that it had
two features which may seem at odds with each other,
but we're both simultaneously true. One is that the plot
is extremely simple. There are not a lot of like
twist and turns and machinations. And at the same time,
at least half of the scenes in this movie, I

(07:24):
had no idea what was going on. By that, I
mean I could not tell you who some at least
some of the characters on screen were, how they arrived at,
what they're doing, why they're doing it, or what it means.

Speaker 1 (07:36):
Yeah, there were a few scenes in this where I
think I watched them three times and then consulted a
plot summary to figure out exactly what the characters were
attempting to do.

Speaker 2 (07:45):
Uh huh, Yeah, I had really in the first half
had a hard time keeping the different characters and their
relationships straight. I did not know who was who until
the Warlock magic really starts happening in the second half.
Then I guess it gets easier to follow.

Speaker 1 (08:00):
Yeah, I mean, ultimately, this is a movie about the
ultimate occult power couple coming back from the dead to
just tear it up. And so once they're back and
in action, you're one hundred percent on board. You can
you basically know where things are going and you can
follow the chaos, but you have to get up to
that point, and it can be a little confusing but

(08:20):
never boring.

Speaker 2 (08:22):
Getting It's like the Sunny and Share of Satanism rise
from the grave in order to get revenge on the
what the descendants of the inquisitors who put them to
the sword?

Speaker 1 (08:33):
Yes, but also I think they they just want to
consume human hearts, drink blood, worship Satan and so forth.

Speaker 2 (08:40):
Yeah. But in the parts where I had no idea
what was going on, I think part of that is
dialogue and dubbing. Like this movie did have that quality
of I would literally be watching a scene with my
full attention. I'm not on my phone, I'm not distracted,
full attention, but then afterwards I could not summarize what
anybody said in the scene, so there's a bit of that.
But then another part I think that made it a

(09:02):
little hard to follow is that the cinematography drifts more
toward that dreamy style that you would see in like
a ful che movie, where I think often our brains
are trained, we pick up on certain cues of how
a scene looks and sounds, and like, ah, this feels
more like a dream sequence. I don't need to pay
close attention to the plot because it's you know, it's

(09:25):
dreamy mode. Except this actually is just the physical reality
of the narrative.

Speaker 1 (09:29):
The world of the living is a dream of the dead,
which is probably not true, but that sounds like the
logic you would hear in a seventies horror trailer, right, yes, yes, yeah,
I think when it comes to this movie's very memorable,
I think, but there is in terms of like remembering lines.
The most memorable lines for me are some of the
dumb things that the painter character Maurice says are occult

(09:53):
power couple here, they have plenty of times where they
basically just say occult things, and while I don't recall
the detail the feel of it resonates, so I'd say
this is a movie that is more to be felt
than comprehended. And again I had I had to go
back and watch something several times just to make sure
I was understanding what they were doing. But to be clear,

(10:13):
this film rocks. You should see it if you want
to see it. If you're like, well, I want to
I want to see this from myself before we get
into the main episode, well let me tell you where
you can get it. First of all, as far as
physical media goes, Shout Factory has the Paul Nashy Collection
out on Blu Ray that has the films in it,

(10:35):
Horror rizes from The Tomb, Vengeance of the Zombies, Blue
Eyes of the Broken Doll, Night of the Werewolf, and
Human Beasts. You can also pick up horrorrizes from The
Tomb on DVD. I watched it on Prime, but it
was not great quality and it was formatted for television.
I think the the version you watched was on TB.

(10:56):
It was letterbox edition, but of course you're gonna have ads,
so you know, it depends how you want to play it.
I ended up going back on Twoby and watching some
of the scenes again that I needed to revisit.

Speaker 2 (11:07):
I mean, I'd say it's worth it just for the
hilarious ad cutaways.

Speaker 1 (11:13):
But who knows how the machine's working there. It may
pick up on something else with somebody else's experience, right, yeah, yeah,
all right, Well, the basic elevator pitch here is yeah,
I mean, Horror rises from the tomb. Don't worry if
you watch this film, Horror will rise from the tomb.
The ultimate occult power couple won't let death stand in
their way.

Speaker 2 (11:30):
It's a tender love story about a warlock and his head.
Boy meets girl, Boy loses head, Boy regains head, Boy
gets revenge, Boy loses his head.

Speaker 1 (11:41):
Well, boy loses, Boy loses his head, Boy loses girl,
Boy regains head, Boy regains girl, Boy loses girl, Boy
loses his head. That's the full plots.

Speaker 2 (11:52):
Dinosaurs eat boy, woman inherits the Earth.

Speaker 1 (11:55):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (12:00):
From the dark and mysterious Middle Ages, full of mystery
and violence, there now comes to the screen. Fear rises
from the tomb, a curse which would bring these people
to the most terrifying situations. Fear rises from the tomb
with all the mystery and terror of medieval rights and witchcraft,

(12:22):
the infernal powers of evil persecuting these defenseless beings. Fear
Rises from the Tomb, a pro film's production, directed by
Carlos auded.

Speaker 2 (12:36):
Seven moms have passed today. We shall take them. I
want when the Supreme day comes, that they are sufficiently
prepared for the sacrifice.

Speaker 1 (12:52):
All right, Well, let's talk a bit about the humans
involved in this before we get back into the plot. So,
as we mentioned already, Paul Nancy did not direct this.
It was directed by Carlos Arid, who lived nineteen thirty
seven through two thousand and eight. He was a Spanish
director of various erotic dramas and Paul Nashy horror films,

(13:13):
including Curse of the Devil from seventy three, Blue Eyes
of the Broken Doll from seventy four, and The Mummies
Revenge from seventy five. As a producer, he helped bring
the films Alien Predator from eighty six into the look.

Speaker 2 (13:27):
Not Alien versus Predator, but not just Alien Predator Alien Predator.

Speaker 1 (13:32):
He also produced or was one of the producers on
Claudio Fragaso of Troll two themes nineteen eighty four film
Monster Dog starring Alice Cooper. What.

Speaker 2 (13:44):
I don't think I knew about that, or if I.

Speaker 1 (13:46):
Did it, I haven't seen it, but I've seen the
posters and some stills from it looks it looks wonderfully awful.
And as you might recall from our episode on trollto,
I mean, Claudio Fragaso took this very seriously, this filmmaking thing,
and so he's exactly the sort of director you want
directing a film called Monster Dog starring Alice Cooper.

Speaker 2 (14:08):
So if troll two was a film about how he
believed that meat eaters were being persecuted by vegetarians, what
is the meaning of Monster Dog.

Speaker 1 (14:18):
I'm not sure, but if the poster is any indication,
he pursues this topic, this subject matter via some sort
of like fleshless killer doberman.

Speaker 2 (14:28):
Gross. Yeah, all right, so that's the director technically, but
I don't know. The vibe gives the pretty much top
to bottom. This is the Paul Nashi show.

Speaker 1 (14:38):
That's right. So who is this guy? So Paul Nashi? Yeah,
who has story and screenplay credits on this. He plays
our warlock character, Alarecht Dimarnac. He also plays This is complicated,
but Alarach's traitor's brother Armand Demarac, and he also plays

(14:59):
Armand's descendant, Hugo Demarac in the present, So three different roles,
and all of them have a different feel to them. Though.

Speaker 2 (15:09):
It's weird because his descendant character is not like the
inheritor of the Warlock throne. He in fact, he basically
just treats his own descendant as another enemy.

Speaker 1 (15:20):
Yeah. Yeah, and you know, there's a total I feel
like there's a different energy to h I mean Hugo
the modern day Paul Nashy character in this Whitch, but
I mean I mean the nineteen seventies. You know, he's
still kind of a stylish dude. But he's also I mean,
he's doomed. He can't stand up to the Warlock. He's

(15:40):
not like, I am the descendant of Alaric, and therefore
I'm the one who can defeat him. No, No, it's
not going to go that way at all.

Speaker 2 (15:48):
Now. In fact, he's a doomed skeptic and he's the
guy who like doesn't believe in the power of spirit mediums,
so you know, things are not going to end well
for him. Movies like this do not reward people who
don't believe in the supernatural and so Nash. But also
I would say about Nashi's character, this is not unique
to him, but he is. This movie has multiple contemporary

(16:11):
characters who are very much like turtleneck sweater tucked into
pants guys.

Speaker 1 (16:16):
Yeah. Yeah, and yeah, they just sort of wander into
all this where they're like, Yeah, let's have a seance
that this old estate, let's call back. Let' seef we
can call the spirit of this dead warlock. That sounds
like a good time. We'll have some wine, we'll smoke
a little bit. What could possibly go wrong?

Speaker 2 (16:33):
I would say Paul Nashi's energy as an actor is
a strange combination something I'm not really used to. In
one sense, he has very traditional, almost kind of like
boxy or rectangular masculine movie star energy. I'm trying to
think of who to compare, you know, like a like

(16:53):
a Ed Begley senior or something. But then on the
other half, kind of a weirdo word meanness that is
almost the likes of Peter Lorie.

Speaker 1 (17:03):
Yeah, yeah, he has his His physicality is is interesting
to behold. Yeah, because because on one level, I mean,
he's he's clearly ripped as we'll discuss he was. He's
a former professional weightlifter, so so he's uh, you know,
he's quite a physical specimen and yes he he but

(17:24):
yet he can. He does have this kind of worm
equality to him. He is the natural energy for playing
this eternal outsider, this warlock that was beheaded in the
past and now has to uh murder his way into
being again in the present. So some of you might
be wondering, well, who is Paul Nashi We're talking about him.
He sounds pretty great. Well, he is, in many people's words,

(17:46):
the Lon Chaney junior of Spanish horror cinema. Wow. So
he was born uh Jaquinto Molino, but he assumed the
name Paul Nashi for for for acting and yeah, he
plays three separate characters in this film. Also wrote the screenplay.
And this is the guy. We can't really appreciate the

(18:06):
full richness of Paul Nashy in a single episode of
Weird House Cinema, but I feel like this is a
really fun film and a great introduction to him at least.
So this is a guy who was born into a
successful furrier's family during the Spanish Civil War, who then
began to pursue a serious adult life of professional weightlifting
and architecture. But deep down he only wanted one thing.

(18:29):
He wanted to be the wolf Man, The Wolfman, The
wolf Man. Yeah. I mean, from what I've read, he
grew up idolizing these old horror movies and especially the
wolfman roles, the Lion Cheney junior sort of roles, and
fate would deliver him in that direction. So he started
out in various uncredited and sometimes rumored roles in various

(18:52):
nineteen sixties Spanish production stuff like El Sid, an episode
of the TV show I Spy. Then in nineteen sixty eight,
he wrote and starred in a film that was originally
titled Mark of the Werewolf, but then on the American
groundhouse circuit it had the name Frankenstein's Bloody Terror, in

(19:12):
which he played werewolf of Valdemar Daninski for the first
of many many times.

Speaker 2 (19:19):
So this was a franchise, Yeah, yeah, he did.

Speaker 1 (19:23):
I think it's like a dozen of these, wow with
titles like Assignment Tear, The Werewolf Versus The Vampire Woman,
The Fury of the wolf Man, Doctor Jekyll Versus the Werewolf,
Curse of the Devil, Night of the Howling Beast, Night
of the Werewolf, The Beast and the Magic Sword, Howl
of the Devil, like Cantripus, The Moonlight Murders, and Tomb
of the Werewolf. Most of these films are from the

(19:45):
seventies and eighties, but they ultimately span five decades, and
they're not a continuous narrative by any means, with the
plots varying wildly, like There's somewhere he goes to Asia
and goes to Tibet and Japan to try and treat
his lacanthropy, but a number of them look phenomenal and

(20:06):
they're just total werewolf features.

Speaker 2 (20:09):
Well, I feel like this sheds new light on a
major flub in the movie that really seems like it
should have been caught, which is that in the English dub,
at least, there's one part where they try to say
the word lichen thropes, but instead they say, I think
lincoln thropes, like President Lincoln.

Speaker 1 (20:27):
Huh, yeah, yeah, I noticed that that was I actually
went back and looked at that on two B with
the captions on, and the captions for this one said
you have empires in Lincoln's robes instead of you are
vampires and Lincoln tropes lichen thropes, but they said lincoln thropes. Yeah,
Lincoln thropes, Yeah, Lincoln throat. The dubs has lincolnthropes. They mean,

(20:50):
like they're talking about lacanthropy. But yeah, but we'll come
back to the formal charges against Alaric in a bet.
But back to Nashi here. Mostly it was this werewolf
character that he returned to, but the warlock character in
this alric. He does come back in a later nineteen

(21:11):
eighty two film called Panic Beats apparently and plays the
character once more.

Speaker 2 (21:15):
Is that about does he become a disco warlock? What's
the beats referred to?

Speaker 1 (21:19):
I'm not sure comes back from the grave. But and
it may not even be connected because, like I say,
much of many of these werewolf films, it's not like
it's a concise narrative. It's like, let's bring let's bring
this guy back again, let's have another adventure. It doesn't
mean it has to actually make sense or be stitched
into the grand fabric of the thing.

Speaker 2 (21:37):
Okay, I see, like you can have many Dracula movies,
but they're not like all direct sequels to each other
with continuous or plot continuity exactly.

Speaker 1 (21:46):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (21:47):
Well, now, but I am thinking beats that because you
look at Nashi as the warlock in this movie, and
he does look like he could tear up the dance floor,
like he would get out there in the lights. I mean,
he'd be doing the whole what's the you know, the
pointing dance, the John Travolta one.

Speaker 1 (22:03):
I know the one. I don't know what it's called. Okay,
So just a little more on Nashi here. I looked
into him a bit of reading an article, actually a
chapter in a book titled an Icon Rises from the
Grave The twenty first century Cult Stardom of Paul Nashi,
written by Andy Willis. Willis writes that Nashi was central
to quote the development, revival, and reinvention of horror cinema

(22:26):
in Spain. The paper mostly centers around the cult like
revival of appreciation for Nashi late in his life and career,
as film fans and filmmakers in Spain and beyond began
to reevaluate his films, but it does put point out that, yeah,
he was very much operating in a time when horror
was seen as very low brow in Spanish cinema, Like,

(22:47):
if you had any self respect, you'd be working in
serious cinema, and if you were doing horror then like
what are you doing?

Speaker 2 (22:54):
But what was sirious cinema at the time, peplam movies
like The Sword and Sandal stuff.

Speaker 1 (23:00):
Yeah, yeah, to serious dramas about history and so forth.
You know nothing about I mean, this is about history though,
this is about an historic warlock. So I don't know.
I don't know why the industry was so down on
this film at the time. All right, well, we'll come back.

(23:24):
We'll discuss more about this wonderful performance as we continue.
But there are there are other human beings we need
to mention, at least in passing. Okay, we mentioned earlier.
This is a power couple. It's not just Alaric, it's
Alaric and Mobile. He has to bring Mobile back to life.
Mobile is played by Helga Lena. Helga is back. She

(23:46):
was the titular Laurele from The Laureles Grasp the you know,
the gorgeous redhead German born actor who made a name
for herself mostly in Spanish cinema. Both of these films
came out in seventy three, so if you want to
hear more about her, go back to that episode. But
she was born in nineteen thirty one. As of this
recording is still alive, and she worked from nineteen forty

(24:10):
one through two thousand and six and played a lot
of fimthatals characters in horror movies, various genre films, and yeah,
it was pretty big in Spanish cinema. And in this
she once more gets to absolutely slay multiple people and
also consume their hearts.

Speaker 2 (24:27):
Yeah, I was noticing incredible amounts of overlap with the
Lorealized Grasp. I was not prepared for how much these
movies would have in common, even down to what looks
like it could be just a coincidence, but what looked
like the same shooting locations, talking.

Speaker 1 (24:44):
About the coastline, that really dreary coastline.

Speaker 2 (24:47):
The dreary lakeside, It looked exactly like the lake in
Lorealized Grasp, And I would almost be surprised if it
was not shot in the same place. But maybe I
don't know.

Speaker 1 (24:57):
I think the actual I don't know about the about
the the lake, but the actual estate that we see
I believe was in Paul Nashy's family, like that that
was his family's estate there that they filmed on.

Speaker 2 (25:10):
But it's not just that Okay, so both movies feature
Hellga Lena as a kind of I don't know, loosely
a vampyrus of sorts, some kind of you know, creature
that comes back from the grave or comes back through
history to slash people with fingernails, like in ways that
leave these like you know, parallel slashes on their bodies

(25:31):
and then extract their hearts and eat them. Both movies
are about this.

Speaker 1 (25:36):
Right though. In the Laurla she changes into an actual
monster and in this movie she just gets more.

Speaker 2 (25:42):
Naked, that's true, but she still does the fingernail slash.

Speaker 1 (25:45):
She does.

Speaker 2 (25:47):
This movie has has Wolverine style slashing.

Speaker 1 (25:50):
But she's great and she really vamps it up.

Speaker 2 (25:52):
Yes, there are great scenes where she and the Warlock
are arguing about, you know, when they're going to eat
hearts or we're gonna eat hearts now, or we're gonna
have to eat him later.

Speaker 1 (26:01):
Yeah, what is the plan? When? When are we praising
Satan right now? No, we need to wait. There's so
many moons we need to wait. The exact details of
their plan are maybe a little vague, but she makes
a good point.

Speaker 2 (26:15):
I mean he's like, no, we need to we'll do
the sacrifice to Satan later and then we'll eat hearts then.
And I think she makes the point that if we
were angry until then, we're going to be making bad decisions.
So we need to eat at least one heart now.

Speaker 1 (26:30):
Yeah, And she's like, honey, we've been dead for a
long time. We've got to eat. Yeah. All right though.
So there these are the two most impressive actors in
the film, but we have some other roles worth mentioning.
Emma Cohen plays, who lived nineteen forty six through twenty sixteen,
plays the character el Vira, not to be confused with

(26:50):
Elvira the horror host So. Emma Cohen was a Spanish
actor as well as a writer and director. In fact,
in twenty eleven she apparently directed did a short film
adaptation of Jorge Luis Borges The Aliph. She was also
the longtime partner of Peruvian born Spanish director Fernando Fernan

(27:11):
Gomez till his death, but she before this, she did
a lot of B movies and horror films in the seventies,
including seventy five's Night of the Walking Dead, Jess Franco's
nineteen seventy five Count Dracula, that's one that starred Christopher
Lee as Dracula, Herbert Lom as Van Helsing, and Kloskinski
as a quote unquote wren Feared. I don't know why

(27:34):
Wrin feared in the IMDb credits, but he is. Cohen
also had an uncredited role in nineteen seventies Nicholas and Alexandria.
And yeah, in this she is she basically, she's our
final girl. She's the one of the two daughters of
one of the villagers in the place that they go to.

Speaker 2 (27:57):
Yeah. Now, I'm gonna admit that I again had a
hard time keeping the different characters and the human characters
in their relationships straight. So if you're asking, like who's
married to who or whatever, I don't know.

Speaker 1 (28:11):
Yeah, I had to go back and I like, at first,
I was like, I guess this was Hugo's wife, but
it's not. No, it's not. He goes why that's a
different character entirely. Well, we'll summarize all that in a bit.

Speaker 2 (28:22):
Okay, there were a number of laugh out loud moments
for me in this movie, but I would say the
biggest one, the best one, is a scene where we
have a guy who's had been seeing visions of dark
eyes staring at him in the night, and he's and
he can't stop seeing them when he closes his eyes,

(28:42):
so he's got to paint. He's a painter, and he's
like painting on a canvas, and then suddenly above the
canvas appears a laughing, severed head that's just going oh
and it and dripping blood all over the painting. And
it's so good. But this paint, like his dopiness makes
it so much better.

Speaker 1 (29:04):
Yes, he's haunted by the head of Aleric and he's like,
I don't know what it is. I keep seeing this head.
I gotta paint it. I gotta paint it. And he's
and he's painting this like sub night gallery quality painting,
you know, of this headless body holding not Alaric's head
but modern Paul Nashi's character's Hugo's head. It's pretty great.

(29:25):
But yeah, this is the This painter character, Maurice was
played by Victor Barrera. I couldn't find any dates for
this actor, but yeah, he's a wonderful, doomed idiot in
this The character is the actor. Barrera appeared in such
Spanish films as nineteen seventies in the Folds of the Flesh,

(29:46):
the seventy three Nashy film Count Dracula's Great Love, and
also the Nashy film Hunchback of the Morgue, as well
as the nineteen seventy three film Green Inferno.

Speaker 2 (29:55):
Who was Count Dracula's Great Love.

Speaker 1 (29:57):
I don't know, I haven't haven't seen it. I'm guessing.
I mean, it could be his career. You know, he
married to his work. But I imagine it's some woman
generally that's probably going to be nice.

Speaker 2 (30:10):
I am married to the blood.

Speaker 1 (30:12):
Yeah. Now, one more thing about Brera. He was also
in the seventy three Judy Geeson film A Candle for
the Devil, and as a director and writer, he did
the nineteen seventy eight film The Terrorist.

Speaker 2 (30:26):
He also tucks his turtlenecks into his pants.

Speaker 1 (30:29):
He does. Yes. Now we're going to skip on the
rest of the actors here, though there are some other
fun performances, but skip into the music. Carmelo A Bernala
did the music. He lived nineteen twenty nine through two
thousand and two. And all I have to say is
I hope you like creepy organ music and weird percussion sounds,
because this film is loaded with it.

Speaker 2 (30:51):
Yeah, it's got this steady, slow, ascending organ melody that
just repeats and repeats and repeats. Honestly, it got a
little monotonous for me.

Speaker 1 (31:03):
I thought it fit this film like a glove. I'm
not saying it would work in every film. I'm not
saying I need a copy of it or I'm looking
for a high grade vinyl release. But for this film,
I thought it worked.

Speaker 2 (31:16):
Yeah, it's the appropriate vibe. But yeah, I mean you'll
hear it quite a few times now.

Speaker 1 (31:23):
Bernlla here He was a longtime Spanish composer of many films,
including seventy four's Torment and seventy threes Count Dracula's Great Love. Oh.

Speaker 2 (31:33):
He wrote the love theme from Count Dractula's Great Love.

Speaker 1 (31:36):
One assumes one more note about a person in this
there's a special effects. The special effects were by Antonio
Molina and I don't have dates for him, but this
is a guy that apparently has been working in special
effects since the nineteen sixties, starting with nineteen sixty four's
This is actually the Barry Sullivan film Pyro the Thing
without a Face that we referenced in our Fiend About

(32:00):
a Face episode but Molina here is apparently still working
today in Spanish productions and even worked on six episodes
of Game of Thrones. I also served as an armor
or supervisor in the Spain unit for such big films
as Wonder Woman nineteen eighty four and Terminator Dark Fate,
So kind of a cool connection there. This is not

(32:20):
a film that you watch and you think, wow, I
guess they had just tons of money to spend on
special effects. No, so, again, as I kind of alluded
to earlier, I feel like the effects in this film,
such as they are, look pretty good.

Speaker 2 (32:34):
Though it is that early seventies euro style of like
very bright red almost orange blood.

Speaker 1 (32:41):
Yeah, yeah, it's alarming. Maybe that's why I got the
TV fourteen. That what you perhaps. Yeah, all right, well,
let's bust into the plot a little bit, Joe, take
us back to the mid fifteenth century.

Speaker 2 (32:53):
Is that when it is mid fifteenth century, I think
they say.

Speaker 1 (32:56):
I think that's what the narration says.

Speaker 2 (32:57):
Yeah, this movie begins with the World's Most Pressing parade.
You're watching like some people kind of tromp through a
vast We see them like on a plane with mountains
in the background. So it's the kind of landscape that
maybe looks like if it had been the true colors,
it would have been beautiful, but instead it looks just profoundly,

(33:20):
deeply unhappy, And it kind of reminds me of some
of the landscapes in Monty Python and the Holy Grail
in that way. That like, something about the film style
and the way the colors come through just makes the
landscape very drab and unpleasant.

Speaker 1 (33:35):
But it's fitting, especially when we find out what this
procession is about. It's about killing and tormenting people accused
of sorcery and witchcraft.

Speaker 2 (33:47):
Right, we're here for the execution of a warlock in
a witch and there's some narration. You get a voiceover.
I think that's saying like I don't remember the exact words,
but it's basically like France, you know, before indoor plumbing. Wow,
do you you think war and disease are bad? How
about Satan?

Speaker 1 (34:06):
Yeah? Superstition, ignorance, violence, They prepare you for all of it.

Speaker 2 (34:12):
Here and the inquisitors' troops here looked to me like
two faces henchmen and batman forever. They've got these goofy
red sock masks over their heads. That was really kind
of Nice. And this is also where we get It's
so the you know, the warlock in the Witch are
taken to the place of execution. I don't know why
it needed to be in the middle of this vast

(34:33):
field with the mountains and the stream, but yeah, that's
where they take them. And then there's some kind of
you know, church official or something who reads out the
charges to them.

Speaker 1 (34:44):
Yeah, and I think Maurice's ancestor is one of these
people as well, so he technically has a double roll. Also,
one of these people's is Alrich's brother, who's kind of
like this one eyed Paul Nashy character with like a
smug grin on his face and a scar. That is
Alaric's brother Armand who is It's implied here that he

(35:05):
kind of helped do his brother in here.

Speaker 2 (35:07):
So yeah, they're but they're both played by Nashi, So
it's Nashy punishing Nashi.

Speaker 1 (35:11):
Yeah, and they read out a full list of charges, which,
in addition to you, are vampires andcanthropes. There, you have
drunk human blood of both the living and the dead.
You have eaten flesh, you have celebrated the Black Mass
with bloody sacrifices of the newborn and of young girls
you have adored Satan and of followers of his Sabbath.

Speaker 2 (35:33):
Yes, verbatim, I believe.

Speaker 4 (35:35):
So.

Speaker 2 (35:35):
Yeah, they put the sorcerers to death. Warlock gets his
head chopped off, and they like, I don't know how
they kill the witch. They like hang her upside down
or something.

Speaker 1 (35:44):
Yeah, and they she screams. It seems like they're commencing
to flogger and then cut. Yeah, she's presumed dead.

Speaker 2 (35:51):
Now here's the thing we discover later. I don't know why.
This is when we find their bodies later in the movie.
So this is going to be hundreds of years later.
Obviously they want to be resurrected from the dead. But
Paul Nashy's body, he's like an incorruptible saint, Like his
body is all there. It still looks like, you know,
totally fresh, and his head looks totally fresh. Meanwhile, Helga

(36:14):
Lina's body is a skeleton with a wig on it.

Speaker 1 (36:17):
Yeah. Different, different, supernatural. Well, I guess here's the thing.
He is the Warlock. He is the one whose body
is flowing with unnatural energies. She is his great love
and therefore she benefits from this sorcery, but she and
She herself is a different type of entity, and later

(36:37):
on in the film we had spelled out directly that
they're slightly different rules for killing one versus the other. Oh,
by the way, that opening execution is carried out via
a decree from Carcassone, which was a French fortified city,
And of course is also the name of a great
German tile based board game which absolutely does not have

(36:59):
a Warlock execut Houston expansion, but I think clearly needs one.

Speaker 2 (37:02):
Oh I never played it. What's a German style? Is
that like Settlers of Catan kind of stuff?

Speaker 1 (37:08):
Yeah, yeah, this one is one. It's a very calm
and very relaxing board game. It's all about building walled
cities and connecting them with roads with tiles, so it
kind of you build it as you go and then
at the end you score everything. And yeah, it's it's
very cool.

Speaker 2 (37:25):
Okay, cut to the present day, and then Robin, I'm
gonna need some help here. Who are the people our
main characters. We have the Paul Nashy guy, and we
have Maurice the painter, and then we have two women
and then some other people.

Speaker 1 (37:42):
Yeah, this was the I had to go back and
put all this together again. But okay, we have we
have al Rex descendant and well technically Armand's descendant, but
also I guess Alerex descendant. This is modern day contemporary
Paul Nashi Hugo and his gal is Sylvia.

Speaker 2 (37:59):
Okay.

Speaker 1 (38:00):
Then we have Hugo's painter friend Maurice, who is also
he's a descendant of one of the witch hunters or
executors here and his gal is Paula.

Speaker 2 (38:09):
Okay, is so is are Sylvia and Hugo the ones
where Sylvia is like, why don't we get married? And
Hugo's like, because I'm Paul Nashy.

Speaker 1 (38:19):
Basically yeah, and I don't really remember what Maurice and
Paula's whole vibe is other than they love each other.

Speaker 2 (38:26):
Yeah, And so.

Speaker 1 (38:27):
Basically they're all like like, hey, we should I forget
exactly how they reach this point, maybe this little research
is going on, but they're like, we should go out
to the country to Hugo's chalet out there, and we
should have we should get this, we should hire somebody
to do a seance so we can get in touch
with his head, which, by the way, Maurice keeps seeing

(38:49):
in his dreams and in his visions as he's drawn
to paint grotesque scenes of decapitation.

Speaker 2 (38:54):
Well, now, wait, I thought they did the seance before
they went to the chalet. Don't they do the while
they're still hanging out they're still in the city.

Speaker 1 (39:02):
I think that's right. Okay, so they do the Yes,
they do the seance first, and that's the inspiration to
then go out into the country and try to find
the body and the head of Alric, which are which
are deposited in different places.

Speaker 2 (39:17):
Yeah. So I think Maurice is like, I'm seeing this
head in my dreams and I'm painting it and I'm
not very smart, and Hugoes like, I don't believe in heads.
And then they're like, well, let's have a seance and
that'll tell us what to do. And then the medium
at the seance is like, there's a severed head that
you must dig up, and it's up at your up
in the village, at your chalet, and.

Speaker 1 (39:38):
That body is buried in the cloisters. Head is in
the crypt of the monastery, and yeah, our our city
humans here are here, like, well, we got to get
these two back together again. Let's get this head in
his body back together, and so they set.

Speaker 2 (39:51):
Out only good can come from it. Yeah, I remember
they argue about this is one of the scenes where
Hugo is skeptical because they're like, you must believe what
Madame Irina said, because you know, it's a spirit was
obviously choking her from beyond the grave. And Hugh Goo's like, oh,
it must have been. She must have put on makeup

(40:12):
to show those bruises. But then why are they trying
to resurrect a spirit that was choking somebody? That seems like,
I don't know that that's red flag number one that like,
you should not resurrect this spirit.

Speaker 1 (40:24):
Yeah, I think so. But what did they do? They
jump in the car that they head out into the countryside,
and here we kind of get into the We initially
get into sort of the Texas chainsaw mask your territory
of the city folks have come out into the country
and now they're encountering country folk who are suspicious and dangerous.

Speaker 2 (40:44):
Well, and yeah, and it was weirdly more, uh, I
don't know, there's politics within this village or something. So
like they get attacked on the road by bandits and
then some other guys show up too, and they're like, hey,
these are the bandits, and they catch the bandits and
just like vigil any Justice murder them. But then also
I think the Vigilanties then are essentially bandits also, and

(41:06):
they tried to extort money from from the.

Speaker 1 (41:08):
Heroes yeah, and end up selling them a car because
they end up Yeah, when the bandits initially attacked, the
end up wrecking the car and they're like, well, we'll
sell you won for three thousand. And of course the
lead bandit is watching as a Hugo busts out this
big roll of money and you know, he's eyeball and
it like, ooh, I'm definitely going to rob these people later. Yeah,

(41:29):
and that is indeed what they are plotting to do later.
We'll come back.

Speaker 2 (41:31):
So here I got I got really confused about how
this was happening. But do if I'm going to do
like Hugo and the rest of them hire the villagers
to just dig up all around this ancient church and
find they're looking for a box that has a warlockhead
in it.

Speaker 1 (41:49):
Yeah, yeah, And I think the villagers are kind of
interested in it because there's also talk of there being
some sort of a treasure, so they're like, yeah, we'll
help you dig this up. He will even go to
that place where they say a demon stalks at night.
So there's this weird mix of very superstitious but also
you know, up for whatever. One of the villagers here

(42:10):
that we meet is this this this Alan character. Uh
and this is the he has twos. He has two daughters,
one is Chantal and the other is Elvira.

Speaker 2 (42:21):
Oh okay, okay, yeah, I didn't know where some of
these characters came from. But so some of the villagers
they find a box they like, dig it up, and
they again correct me if I'm wrong. I think they
think it's treasure. So they get real excited and they
open it up, like they blow torch the lock and
crack it open. But when they crack it open, it's

(42:41):
not treasure. It is a warlockhead. And then the warlockhead
hypnotizes them and turns them into like like murderers.

Speaker 1 (42:51):
Yeah. Yeah, Alrich's head hypnotizes them and particularly hypnotizes Alan here,
the father of Elvira, and has him go around with
this huge scary scythe this this wonderful crooked cutting implement
that again, I think is quite scary and has him
going around butchering people with that.

Speaker 2 (43:12):
Yeah, so for a while here there just seems to
be kind of like random roaming sickle guys and they
are there. Some people are just getting killed and other
people are getting hypnotized to go work for the warlock head.
The head right, because it's not a full warlock yet.
It's in fact, the most hilarious detail is that they

(43:33):
there's like a scene where they literally go down into
the crypt and they start taking orders from the warlock head.
He's like he can't move his head, so it's really funny,
like how far his eyes move back and forth when
he's looking at the different people, Like what's this?

Speaker 1 (43:47):
Now?

Speaker 2 (43:47):
You know you must do.

Speaker 1 (43:48):
This very you know, templar esque in terms of, you know,
the charges that were leveled against the Templars about the
worship of decapitated heads. And it reminds me a little
bit of the treatment of this idea in C. S.
Lewis's that hideous strength as well. But but yeah, the

(44:15):
head needs the body, it needs people to help with
the body, and some blood needs to be spilled on
along the way, and so we do get a series
of sickle murders, including Alan killing his own daughter chan
Chantelle here in a pretty terrifying scene. This is a
scene I had to watch a couple of times because
I thought it ended up being you know blocked in,
you know in a way that and shot in a

(44:36):
way that that I found rather effective. Uh, there's there's
a certain art to having your your brutal you know,
Jallo style murders in a film, and they don't always work.
Sometimes they come off very fake, or they come off
more about showing the blood than sort of you know,
teasing the idea of the violence. So this is not

(44:58):
one of those scenes where we see a lot of
like hearting of flesh and see heart getting ripped out
and so forth. But there's just like this sudden attack
and then the sickle comes out and there's a sound effect.
I thought it worked really well.

Speaker 2 (45:10):
Oh but there is the ladder in this movie. There's
plenty of that where there seems, but there's one where
Helga Line literally just like reaches into a guy's chest
cavity with her fingers and prize his chest apart to
get that heart.

Speaker 1 (45:23):
Yeah, the chest cat. This is one of those films where, yeah,
human flesh is just like putty to the undead, and
they can just rip right in there and pull out
any organ they want.

Speaker 2 (45:33):
This is another sequence though, where I was like, when
people were getting sickled, I did not know who was who,
and I was confused when somebody like it seems like
somebody turns up dead and then the next scene somebody goes, well,
she's sleeping now, and I was like, well, wasn't she dead?
Then I think maybe they're talking about another character who
was present, So I don't know.

Speaker 1 (45:52):
Yeah, this is one of those films too, where on
one hand the script was allegedly written in like two days,
but on the other hand too, it's like we're dealing
with the Grindhouse era doubting, where it wasn't really about
necessarily making sure that all the intricacies of the original
dialogue are maintained. It's about getting that product out right.

Speaker 2 (46:13):
So at some point after this, there's a scene where
both Sylvia and Maurice get hypnotized to go work for
the Warlock, right, So, like Maurice goes out walking and
then he gets hypnotized by hypnotized Sylvia and they all
end up going down into the crypt and that's where
the warlock head starts talking to them. This was another

(46:34):
laugh out loud scene for me. Again, anytime the head
is talking without the body, I found it very funny.
And he gives a full bond villain monologue, but as
a severed head sitting in a box talking and I
had to transcribe this, I thought it was great. So
it is like you, Maurice, he says the last name.
I don't remember what it is. You know, you, Maurice,

(46:55):
with the blood of my enemies running through your veins,
you will serve and help me accomplish my vengeance. Today
the faithful Companion Mobile de la Cree will return, and
in the space of seven moons, and when the heavens
are propitious, our power will be at its maximum strength,
so that we can exterminate all those who executed us,

(47:18):
and our unbounded hatred will make all mankind tremble, and
thereby we will thus be avenged. Right, it sounds like
a plan, and thereby we will thus be avenged. I
think this warlock in his day job, may have been
a lawyer. It's very contracty kind of language.

Speaker 1 (47:41):
Well, you know, back, I mean, I think that's fair.
Back in the day like what was a warlock but
a lawyer who dealt mainly with one client, that being
the Lord of the pet himself, Lord Satan.

Speaker 2 (47:55):
But also in the scene this is I think the
resurrection scene where the war lock and Mobile are sort
of brought back, so like they put the Warlock's head
back on his body and somehow they turn Mobile from
a skeleton with a wig on into hellgalln A, oh god.

Speaker 1 (48:11):
This is seen is great. Yes, So the the resurrected
Alic here, he's one piece again. He places the unconscious
Sylvia upon the skeletal remains in the casket, slices open
her chest, and then he kind of necrophilatically resurrects Mabel.
Mabel he like kind of like lays on top of

(48:34):
these two bodies in the casket. And then the next
shot is Mabel is rising up out of the casket
like the bones of her old bones like spilling to
the side, and she's back baby. And then Alaric kills
Alan and cuts out his heart. So just a great
sequence of events here. I guess, like I say, they're

(48:56):
a power couple. You can't help you feel their energy
and get behind him here.

Speaker 2 (49:00):
Yeah, and they're clearly happy to be reunited. They are
ready to go do copious evil together. Yes, so I
think there's like a scene where they're getting it was
not clear, but they're like getting revenge on the descendants
of the people who executed them. I think they're just
going and like attacking random villagers.

Speaker 1 (49:20):
I guess. I guess this was part of the vengeance,
or it might have just been a situation with like
we got to power up and eat more hearts. But yeah,
there are these wonderful scenes where Alaric and Mabel go
off to love up and kill other characters. I'm not
sure these are necessarily characters that we had met before.
Mabel finds a young villager dude, she strips nude and

(49:41):
he gets nude, and then she backscratches him to death yep.
And then Alaric's occult charisma causes a villager woman to
strip nude, so he strips nude, and this is when
we get to see physique by Nashi here, and then
they climb into bed together. Cut to villager dude with
his backslashed, cut to nude woman dad with her heart

(50:01):
cut out.

Speaker 2 (50:02):
I think this is a John Saxon situation, though, where
like Nashy, clearly he's like, I got to show my
chest in this movie. People need to see these muscles. Yeah,
so he found ways to work it in.

Speaker 1 (50:13):
I had. It also made me look up as with
John Saxon, I had to look up old bodybuilding photographs
and yeah, you see some. I found some old Paul
Nashi shots of him in like full bodybuilder mode and yeah,
pretty impressive.

Speaker 2 (50:26):
Okay, Now there's some like Magic Dynamics where there's like
a magical amulet that pops up sometime around here in
the movie, and I was trying my hardest to figure
out did we already know something about this or is
this just out of nowhere? Like, oh, yeah, there is
an amulet that will defeat the warlock.

Speaker 1 (50:45):
Yeah, this kind of comes out of nowhere. As I
recall Elvira, the local girl and ultimately she's going to
be our final girl here, she's like, oh, by the way,
I just remembered something. There's this Thor's Hammer amulet and
it can destroy powerful undead creatures.

Speaker 2 (50:59):
Oh.

Speaker 1 (51:00):
So useful information to suddenly have. And also we later
learn and I don't remember how we learn this, but
we learned that Thor's Hammer will not outright destroy a
female undead a female resurrected being. No, for that, you
need a long silver needle.

Speaker 2 (51:18):
Right, So, yeah, the hammer only works on Paul Nashi,
the warlock Paul Nashi. I remember how they find this out.
They open up a book and they're reading the book
and I'm like, what is this book. I don't know
if they ever explain what the book is. They just
have a book that tells you how to kill the warlock.

Speaker 1 (51:36):
This was the research portion of the movie. I forgot
about this.

Speaker 2 (51:39):
But so there is a scene where after this, like,
the remaining humans include Hugo, who is unhypnotized at this point.
That's normal, that's regular, Paul Nashi, and Elvira, and I
think maybe somebody else I don't know. So zombies attack
the house and it's really This was also very funny

(52:01):
because I think we get Alan or Elaine, the guy
from the village, talking to Elvira and he's like, el Vira,
my daughter opened the door and he sounds like Dracula,
but she's like, oh dad. But when the zombies get
into the house, they are vocal fry zombies. They are

(52:22):
just wandering the halls, going non stop until there's a
torch stand off. Paul Nashy lights up a torch and
waves it at them. He does an awful lot of
waving that torch that goes on for a while, and
eventually he gets him out of the house. He's like shoo, shoo,
and you know, they get out of the door, and

(52:43):
then he I think, tries to burn them, but I
don't know if it exactly works, because later he's like
looking for their bodies in the lake or something he kept.

Speaker 1 (52:52):
There's a there's a brief burning man stunt here where
he catches one of the one of the zombies on fire,
or at least catches the pants and the back on fire.

Speaker 2 (53:03):
Uh huh.

Speaker 1 (53:04):
So yeah, basically Night of a Living Dead scenario here
with dead villagers. They're able to successfully successfully fight them
off until Don.

Speaker 2 (53:12):
After this, Maurice comes back the painter guy, and he's like, well,
I'm not hypnotized by the warlock anymore. And Hugh goes like,
oh great, well then I need you to go help
me do something. We're going to need an axe and
some wood, and then he says to Elvira. So they're
leaving the house and he's like, you stay here. It's
going This is a direct quote. It's going to be disagreeable.

(53:34):
You'll be in no danger even if you're alone. What's
the basis for that?

Speaker 1 (53:39):
I guess it's because it's daytime. The sun is Oh yeah,
that could be it, and she shouldn't see what they're
going to do. What they are going to do. This
is the same the following sequence. I think I watched
three different times and finally consulted a summary to really
nail down what they were trying to do in this sequence.

Speaker 2 (54:00):
Well, what are they trying to do this? So they
go to the lake and the lake is making bubbling
tar pit sounds, and I don't know why, but.

Speaker 1 (54:06):
They have to live an axe and they have firewood,
and they have like a big long pole with a
hook on it, like they're going to drag the lake.
Apparently they have come out here to find the bodies
of the zombies from last night, any remaining bodies, and
burn them.

Speaker 2 (54:22):
But they don't quite get to do that because Maurice
was not so unpossessed after all. Looks like this was
all a trap.

Speaker 1 (54:30):
That's right, a brutal betrayal in which Maurice possessed Maurice
kills Hugo with a shotgun.

Speaker 2 (54:37):
So this is regular Paul Nashi is dead. Now only
warlock Pole Nashi remains.

Speaker 1 (54:42):
Right, And again I was kind of surprised by this
because I thought it was going to ultimately be Nashi
versus Nashi, but instead no, only Aleric remains.

Speaker 2 (54:50):
But however, I think Maurice is genuinely awakened from his
hypnotized state by the Thor's hammer amulet, like I think,
what's her name? Alvira presses that against him and then
he's like, oh, I'm good now. Yeah. Then that's when
they read the book they find. They just start reading

(55:11):
a book and it tells them how to kill warlocks
and zombies and the silver Needle and all that. Meanwhile,
this is when we get the argument between the warlock
and hell Gallina about when they should eat hearts. You know,
I will eat hearts later, but I'm hungry now. And
they settle this by going out to find the bandits
or the vigilantes from earlier who were camped out with

(55:32):
a fire by the riverbank, and they just say, Hi,
We're gonna eat your hearts now, and they do. This
is where Mabile like rips the dude's chest open with
her hands.

Speaker 1 (55:41):
Nice. So many chests get ripped open in this film,
and this all leads up to our final showdown. So
on one hand, we have we have Maurice, and we
have Alvira, and then we also have Alrich and Mabel
and Alvira and Maurice. They have the weapons now they
feel like they know what they need to do. They

(56:02):
have the amulet, they have the needle, and so the
battle begins basically the way this is. I thought thought
this was a nice final showdown, but ultimately Maurice and
Alaric both throw items at each other at the same time.
Maurice is throwing the thor amulet and Alaric is throwing
an axe, so Maurice is killed by the axe. Meanwhile,

(56:23):
the amulet hits Alaric and wounds him. Alvira is fighting
Mabel and stabs her with a silver needle, which just
destroys her. And then Elvira picks up the amulet and
presses it to the wounded Alaric's head, and this results
in a nice dramatic death sequence for Paul Nashy's Alaric.

Speaker 2 (56:43):
So Elviras survives The Warlock Horror.

Speaker 1 (56:46):
That's right, Alaric. He falls to his knees, his head
falls off his body, and his head tumble down some
stairs and then just burned to a crisp.

Speaker 2 (56:55):
They end up looking at they're kind of like a
smoldering orange newspapers. It looks lake.

Speaker 1 (57:00):
Yeah. And then and then Elvirah, in kind of a daze,
she wanders back down to the lake and she throws
the thor amulet into the water, and that's the end
of the movie.

Speaker 2 (57:11):
Now that's the I was confused by that. Why did
she throw the amulet in the water. The amulet wasn't bad,
The amulet protected them from evil. How does she know
that there isn't that she's not gonna need that again?

Speaker 1 (57:24):
I don't know. I mean, she seemed to think it
belonged there. I don't know if she was like, I've
had enough of this, I'm throwing this into the water.
If this is like throwing Goose's dog tags into the
ocean and top gun, I don't know, if this is
like ex Caliber needs to be returned to the lake
and so she's throwing those thrown into the lake. I'm
not sure exactly what the rationale was here, other than

(57:45):
to have a kind of haunting, ambiguous ending to the
whole affair. M yeah, which is sort of what we
had in the Loralai Scrasp. We had a haunting, ambiguous
ending by the lake shore.

Speaker 2 (57:58):
That's right. Yeah, Except this movie, unlike Lorealized Grasp, does
not have a doomed monster romance component. It does not
have like the human falls in love with a monster.
If there is a love story, it's the love story
between two evil monsters and uh and unfortunately they are
both they are both thwarted by by bumbling humans in

(58:19):
the end.

Speaker 1 (58:20):
Well, Aleric is clearly upset when his loved one dies again,
like we do get a moment of him reacting to that,
and I felt bad for him because again I was
one percent behind this power couple. I'm not sure what
their their their modern power couple name would be combining
Alaric and Mabel. I'll leave met for Maloric Malaric, team Malarek. Yeah,

(58:43):
I was one hundred percent on team Malrek. So yeah,
I was a little a little sad when when when
when things went down the way they did.

Speaker 2 (58:49):
I think Nashi's look as the warlock is far superior
to his look as a modern day man, So yeah, definitely. Yeah.
On one day, he's wearing this gross, pale make up
and he always looks sweaty, and he's got this fake
beard and he's got the cool cape and everything, and
that all just gels. That works, and the other words.

Speaker 1 (59:08):
There's an actual gel too, there's that red gel or
purple gel. So he has this demonic light to him
and yeah, he's just the got this sardonic look on
his face. Absolutely love this look.

Speaker 2 (59:19):
That look. That look works. And when you compare that
to his look as the modern man who tucks his
turtleneck in, it's just it's not the same.

Speaker 1 (59:27):
Right. Oh, one before we close out, one more Maurice
moment that I love. There's a part earlier in the
film where they've gone out into the country and he
comes back from town. I'm not sure what he was
doing in town, but he's talking to Hugo and he's like, yeah,
this place sucks. Like I went into town and the
kids were throwing rocks at me.

Speaker 2 (59:46):
Yeah, I loved it. I did not know what that meant,
but it was funny.

Speaker 1 (59:51):
All right. The movie is Horror Rises from the Tomb. Yeah,
it's a lot of fun. At some point in the future,
I may have to come back and look around at
some of these Paul Nashi werewolf films and figure out
what might be the Paul Nashi werewolf film to watch.
I'm not sure, but if anyone out there has any ideas,
feel free to write in and let us know. All right.

(01:00:14):
In the meantime, if you want to listen to other
Weird House Cinema episodes, you'll find them in the Stuff
to Blow your Mind podcast feed every Friday. We're mainly
a science podcast, but once a week we like to
set aside everything that's serious and just talk about a
weird film. So yeah, get that wherever you get your podcasts.
If you want a full list of the movies we've covered,
there are two places you can go for that, aside

(01:00:35):
from the episode feed. You can go to letterbox that's
l E T T E R bo x D, and
if you look up the account Weird House, you'll find
a list there with all the movies in there. So
you can give this nice visual of everything that we've
covered and sometimes a glimpse at what we're going to cover.
I also blog about these at a personal blog titled
Summuta Music, so you can go there as well.

Speaker 2 (01:00:58):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth
Nicholas Johnson. 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 your Mind dot com.

Speaker 3 (01:01:20):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.