La notte dei diavoli

Based on a book I've never read (Aleksei Tolstoy's The Family of the Vourdalak), Night of the Devils deals with the supernatural creature known as the wurdulac (also spelled wurdalak, vourdalak or verdilak), a type of Eastern European vampire that is compelled to drink the blood of its loved ones, thereby converting the whole family.

Lumber importer Nicolas (Gianni Garko) encounters such monsters in a Yugoslavian forest. After pranging his car, he sets off on foot to find help, eventually meeting a family who live in a house in the woods, where he is invited to stay the night. Nicolas is intrigued when his hosts barricade all of the doors and windows at nightfall; he eventually discovers that the family is plagued by a wurdulac that comes a-calling once it is dark.

With a very measured pace, this isn't going to be for everyone, but fans of atmospheric Euro-horror will be delighted by the creepy vibe throughout and some genuinely tense moments, the best being Nicola's frantic escape from the woods in his car (attacked by wurdulacs and mocked by ghoulish wurdulac children), and the gripping finalé, which packs a neat downbeat twist.

Meanwhile, those who enjoy a spot of gore and nudity will be pleased to know that are some juicy moments of splatter (a woman's face exploding, a beating heart removed from a body, severed fingers, and several bloody stakings, all courtesy of FX man Carlo Rambaldi) and a fair amount of T&A (ravishing Agostina Belli, as Nicola's love interest Sdenka, sheds all for her art, while Teresa Gimpera has her top torn open by one of the vampiric kids).

N.B. The wurdulac also appears in Mario Bava's classic horror compendium Black Sabbath, a film I've yet to see (I know, I know... and I call myself a horror fan).

Story about a man who breaks down and seeks shelter with a less than ordinary family with an extraordinary dilemma. Let's just say things do go bump in the night for this family of the woods.

Night of the Devils unfortunately is vastly unseen. It has lots of things going for it, like a cast that is truly gung-ho and some pretty good writing. The atmosphere is dark and ominous which gives the film a really great feel.

The film does drag in parts where some scenes will go on for a tad too long, but sometimes this becomes a good thing, because it will strengthen the mood of the film. Also the film struggles with its music at times. The music itself is good, and fitting, but at the same time the timing wasn't used very well. Instead of letting the scene play out and remain questionable they'd throw in music where it'd make you realize what would take place. Minor issues that barely damage the viewing experience as a whole.

Overall the movie was a really good slow-burn flick with pretty strong performances, an eerie vibe and awesome fx work. Though plagued by a decent amount of predictability it still ended up being a very recommendable movie to horror fans who can dig slower films.

A great, obscure Italian gem from the 70's, directed by Giorgio Ferroni, "Mill of the Stone Women". It's based on the same story as the "Wurdalack" segment of Mario Bava's "Black Sabbath", and I consider to be about on the same level of the latter. It's much more mean-spirited and darker than Bava's version, and while it may not be as elegant and subtly creepy, this one is quite frightening and suffocatingly atmospheric in it's own right, with some surprisingly haunting and disturbing set pieces. The characters and the story were much better developed, and unlike "Black Sabbath", I actually cared for them. The actors also did a pretty good job, with some solid performances. Still, I thought the violence and nudity came off as gratuitous and were not really necessary, and Carlo Rambaldi's special effects didn't age very well, specially compared to his other works. Nevertheless, Ferroni's stylish direction and Georgio Gaslini's eerie, melancholic score more than make up for it's flaws. I also loved how the film is slow paced, but never gets boring, always keeping the viewers on the edge of their seats.

Never heard of this one! Gianni Garko, scratched, bloody, and having crazy visions, stumbles out of the woods and collapses. He is found and taken to the nearest nut house, where Dr Umberto Raho starts performing tests on him. Gianni is unresponsive and doesn't even seem to know his name, and only comes alive at night, where the darkness makes him really nervous. He REALLY comes alive when a mysterious woman shows up at the hospital, causing him to go completely insane and ends up wearing a nice comfy straightjacket while we witness a lengthy flashback.

You see Gianni was merely driving through the Yugoslavian countryside when a freak accident forced his car off the road. He eventually finds his way to a country house (not noticing the two men burying a corpse in a bloodied sheet), and finds himself in the company of a very frightened family indeed.

What we have here is another Italian film version of the Tosltoy novella The Family of the Vourdalak, and despite the other version being directed by Mario Bava and being great, this version holds it's own too. Basically there's a witch running around the woods who has turned that guy they just buried into a vampire and now the head of the family must go out and kill her. He warns everyone that if he returns after six o'clock, he must be killed on the spot, so naturally he comes back at that time...and all hell breaks loose in the family household.

This version takes its time to get to the chills, but still manages to convey the tension and horror that's needed. Those creepy kids help too, as does Gianni's mounting terror of what's unfolding around him. There's a thick atmosphere about the film too, with the animal skulls lying around and the reluctance of the family to explain to Gianni what's going on.

There's also a nice ambiguous ending too, just for kicks. Some gore and boobs for those that thought that was missing from Bava's version. Melting faces too, and who can hate a film where someone's face explodes?

Not I....not....I...

Considering that I only acquired a major affinity for "Euro-Cult" fare following my attendance of the "Italian Kings Of The B" retrospective first held during the 2004 Venice Film Festival, it is small wonder that I had been largely underwhelmed by what I sampled from this particular fount of movie lore beforehand; curiously enough, among these had been two distinct adaptations of Tolstoy's "The Wurdulak", namely an episode in Mario Bava's omnibus BLACK SABBATH (1963) and the picture under review!

Being about to revisit the former on account of Bava's recent centenary, I opted to re-acquaint myself with Ferroni's feature-length version as well – having already done similar duty with two films based on the same tale (also Russian in origin) which had inspired Bava's BLACK Sunday (1960). Incidentally, in my comments relating to the Maestro's take on "I Wurdulak", I had surmised about how padded Ferroni's rendition would be in comparison: however, he works around this factor, so to speak, admirably by updating the plot to our times (while retaining the essential Gothic feel and, thus, accentuating its inherent eeriness!) and bookending it with scenes inside a clinic, to where the disoriented protagonist (in this case, Gianni Garko) had been taken after barely escaping with his life from the clutches of the undead family unit at the core of the narrative.

There is no doubt that Ferroni had watched Bava's version – as its numerous shots of characters peering ominously through windows can attest – yet he opts to dilate what is perhaps its most chilling moment (the 'afflicted' child pleading with his mother to be sheltered from the cold, dark night and the woman being unable to resist her instincts lets him in, despite knowing full well that her offspring had just been laid down into the ground!) by having the mother merely go out to look for her in this case!! Other elements which tend not to work here are: the personification of the witch (who is the cause of the hero's getting stranded in the quasi-deserted Yugoslavian village to begin with!) and her face-off with the patriarch (himself – though reasonably authoritative – clearly no match for horror icon Boris Karloff, his counterpart in BLACK SABBATH) whose resolution is, thankfully, still left ambiguous; also, the fact that the family members get all giggly when, as vampires, they descend en masse upon the beleaguered Garko. That said, his somewhat hysterical characterization is poles apart from that of Mark Damon in the original – who remains decidedly (and, perhaps, unrealistically) cool throughout his ordeal! Even so, while there is a poignancy to Garko's murder of Agostina Belli – who he had thought had joined the vampiric ranks and was now seeking to add the hero to their fold in view of her feelings towards him (and suggesting how psychologically scarred he had been by the whole experience) – the sequence is rather clumsily handled overall, as the girl should have made it immediately apparent to him that she had not 'turned'!

The passage of nearly a decade between versions allowed for greater emphasis this time around on gory make-up effects; indeed, I recall having counted the film's entire ghoulish vibe (appropriate though it may be) as a drawback upon first viewing! Incidentally, even if I had long bemoaned my erasing of that preliminary copy, I realize now – via a side-by-side comparison of two prints floating about (another one, which I also own, is English-dubbed, subtitled in Japanese and has its few moments of nudity digitally-covered!) – that it was missing a surreal nightmare sequence at the very start!! By the way, director Ferroni – whose penultimate work this proved to be and whom I learned, from the accompanying Gianni Garko interview, was virtually deaf! – had previously helmed a key entry in the Italian Gothic Horror canon, i.e. MILL OF THE STONE WOMEN (1960). Interestingly, too, he died on my 5th birthday (17th August) in 1981…a date also shared by the original Italian release of BLACK SABBATH itself!