Monday, May 30, 2011

HORRORS OF SPIDER ISLAND / Pacemaker Pictures - 1965

Welcome to our Monster Monday post with Tabonga, here at The Dungeon!.. Tonite we gots a real wild 'n' wooly Dungeon Reprise fer ya'll.

So, get ready, here's the history of this crazy little flick... It's a West German film titled EIN TOTER HING IM NETZ, or, BODY IN THE WEB, and was shot in Nicola, Yugoslavia. It was released in German in West Germany in 1960 and included nude swimming scenes with the girls, and, was 89 minutes in length. It was distributed in the US, dubbed in English (weird, it looks like they're all speaking English!) in 1962, and titled, IT'S HOT IN PARADISE, with nude scenes intact. In 1965 it was retitled and rereleased in the US as HORRORS OF SPIDER ISLAND with the nudity omitted and ran for 77 minutes. It's also known as A CORPSE HANGS IN THE WEB, THE SPIDER'S WEB and GIRLS OF SPIDER ISLAND. Then, it was lost for years! A print was luckily discovered in an eccentric's vault in Europe (in the eighties I believe), or, it might have been lost forever!!!.. DAMN!!

The music is by Karl Bette and Willy Mattes, Willie also worked on another wild German flick, THE HEAD. The music really swings at times, you know, stuff that goes along with a bunch of half naked chicks running all over the place!..

Lettuce bring in our littlest Dungeon helper and big red 'GO' button pusher, der ein und nur, Rufus The Gnat!!.. Hooray for Rufus! So, on with the show! Rufus, hit the button! Here's... HORRORS OF SPIDER ISLAND!

Let's see her dance!.. Whoa, I said dance!

They use horrible stock footage of a burning plane going down with cuts of screaming dames to tie it together. The plane slams into the ocean so hard that nobloody could have possibly survived... Next thing you know, they're all in a life raft, complaining!!

This part where the girls find fresh water to cure their thirst cracks me up! It looks like director Fritz Böttger told them to eat it!

Chickie-poos, I don't know why you're all cracking up, I jus' wanted to show you this new dance I came up with! Check it out, I call it... The Spider Web Twist! Pretty wild, yeah?!

Alex D'Arcy plays manager Gary Webster. Alex was also in WAY... WAY OUT and BLOOD OF DRACULA'S CASTLE. Here, he gets the message from an insinuating brush of the boobs!

Let's face it, this was a damn good looking monster for 1959, the year it was filmed!

And, this part has the feel of ALIEN, as the thing holds on and bites Gary's neck! It takes him awhile to get it off.

One of my favorite scenes is when they all go looking for their boss, yelling.. Ga-ry... Oh, Ga-ry! for like 5 minutes!

Hey, BooBoo!.. I found Gary!!

The sexual tension is so thick, you could cut it with a catfight!!

Leave it up to old Gary to ruin the fun!.. Love Bab's hair!

Here's one for all the slobber jockeys out there, enjoy!

Wimmen, go figure! First they act all mean and tough to the two guys that have just found them...

So, what do they do?.. That's right, strip down to their undies and bras and decorate them with flowers!!.. Oh, Hell yeah!!!

The music at the party always makes me think of a booze fueled New Years rendition of Jingle Bells!! I even see the drummer with his loose, floppy tongue hanging out!

Babs is played by Barbara Valentin and was known as the German Jayne Mansfield, with measurments of 41-24-36. She had 89 acting credits and was in THE HEAD. She died at age 61 in 2002 and was a friend of Freddie Mercury.

This one was on her way to the lagoon to have sex with one of the horndogs, and, this is what happens to her! Moral... What are ya, stupid?!

Hello!.. Is anybloody to home?!.. Hey, did you know that you gots a hole in yer wall?!.. Hello?!

Gary's beating the crap out of everbloody until one of the girls ignites a flare and realizes that he doesn't like them at all! So, it's off to the races as they chase him away, each holding their scary fire stick!

Gary gets chased into some quicksand and quickly goes under. Weird place for a pool of quicksand, on an ocean cliff in Yugoslavia... Sometimes, fiction is stranger than truth!

We'll end the fun with this nice page from the German presskit.

Eegah!! and Tabonga! are veterans. Ghoulnight Everbloody!!..

Saturday, May 28, 2011

THE BLACK TORMENT - Robert Richards - "Murderer!" (1964)

I sat down and tried to watch "The Black Torment" one night, and I just couldn't face it! I had a long hard day at work, and it just wasn't something I felt like doing! The next night I tried it again when I was in a better mood, and I'm glad I did, because "The Black Torment" is not only a fairly cool title, it's actually really a pretty good flick for a 60's English horror film that's not a Hammer! The music for "The Black Torment" was composed by Robert Richards in one of his only five composing gigs! The other 4 titles were "Saturday Night Out," 13 episodes of the "Mogul" TV series, "The Smashing Bird I Used To Know," and "Bloodsuckers!" Robert was also one of the drummers in the flick "Gonks Go Beat!"

It's a coming home party for John Turner as Sir Richard Fordyke and his new bride Heather Sears as Lady Elizabeth Fordyke! John Turner was in "The Giant Behemoth" and "Captain Nemo And The Underwater City" and Heather was Christine Charles in the 1962 Herbert Lom version of "The Phantom Of The Opera!"

You might recognize Black John there on the left! It's the awesome Francis De Wolff who has been in too many cool films to mention, like "Corridors Of Blood," "The Man Who Could Cheat Death," "The Two Faces Of Dr. Jekyll," "Curse Of The Werewolf," and "From Russia With Love."

Peter Arne is Seymour, Sir Richard's best man friend! You've seen Peter in movies like "The Atomic Man," "You Know What Sailors Are," "Secret Of Mystery," and "Battle Beneath The Earth!

This joint looks like something out of freakin' "Alice In Wonderland" with that checkerboard floor!

Sir Richard is convinced his Father will love Lady Elizabeth as much as he does, but in the vernacular, she can't imagine how that would be physically possible!

Joseph Tomelty is Sir Giles Fordyke, Richard's Pop! Sir Giles had a stroke and lost his ability to talk so he signs, which is something you didn't used to see much in the movies, in fact, I don't think I've ever seen anybody use sign language in a film like this before! This was Joseph Tomelty's last movie, but he lived til 1995!

This is what a toast looks like from Sir Giles' perspective!

There have been a lot of murders committed while Sir Richard was gone, and many of the locals claim they have seen him at night even though he was many kilometers away, and just because he has returned with a new wife doesn't make the killings stop!

Sir Richard is almost constipated with grief and guilt, even though he knows he has had nothing to do with any of it!

There's also another factor, his dead ex-wife keeps appearing at night outside of the window that she accidentally fell out of!!

Ostler tees up on the very difficult par three 18th hole! From that distance, I think that's a mashie niblick he's using!

Now it's really starting to get ugly, first Sir Giles' wheel chair is found at the foot of the stairs, then Sir Giles himself is discovered hanging from the chandelier!!

Dying is kind of a national pastime in this neck of the woods!

Jeez, now the ex's ghost is even appearing inside the house, and Sir Richard is just about to go 100% screaming yellow bonkers!!

Okay, I'll tell you that Sir Richard has an identical twin brother that he's never met who Sir Giles kept penned up downstairs for years, and he is madder than the Mad Hatter and Jack Nicholson in "The Shining" combined!

It's a family reunion of the worst kind when the dead ex-wife and the crazy as a loon unknown brother all come out to meet Lady Elizabeth at the same time!

Oh my goodness, he's drooling, and she still thinks it's her husband, but she's going to shoot his ass anyway!

Sir Richard finally declares, "What the eff in Hell is going on around here?" Besides all that it seems that best pal Seymour and Diane, the gal who was Sir Giles' companion were both in cahoots too, and it was Diane who was the ghost all along!

Hey, if you like buxom beauties and krazy madmen, you'll dig "The Black Torment" no doubt! I found it on Netflix, and you can too!

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AAARRGGHHH!!!! Ya'll Come On Back Now, Y'Hear??