Boris Karloff hosts Black Sabbath (1963), an Italian-made trio of short movies. All three share the same traits: excellent staging in the typical style for the genre, which perhaps some might find trite, but I thought was entirely appropriate for these stories: decaying furniture cluttering rooms housing decaying characters whose endings are mostly foul. The acting is adequate, and in some cases more than adequate. Lighting and makeup are quite good, illuminating faces, bodies, entire rooms in effective ways.
But the stories! Ah! These are less than adequate, for they lack some of the basics of story-telling: logic and empathetic characters. That these are stories of horror means that supernatural monsters, full of lusts rare and improper, may appear, but in order to bring even the beginnings of horror, even terror, to our nerves requires a certain sympathy for those who are about to suffer for their own moral defects; the nearest I could find to a gesture of empathy is that the victims are either female, or young males, and thus perhaps a cultural requirement is that we feel empathy for such; but this does not work for me, and I have to wonder if this is an Italian characteristic, as Italian movies often seem to skip this step.
And logic. There is, of course, the suspended logic of the horror movie, the supernatural ignoring the otherwise ironclad rules of physics in their quest to invert the quivering nerves of their victims; but here I speak of normal, everyday logic: characters that act and react in expected ways, that we understand how at least some do, while others may be ciphers that are eventually revealed. Sadly, these characters appear to be dragged about by their collars, the plots plunging them hither and yon.
So, to the stories.
The first concerns a woman who must prepare a dead woman for burial. As she does so, she filches a large ring, tearing it from the late owner’s finger with a fury. Perhaps she is poor, but we don’t know. But the corpse is monstrous, terrifying. The woman then returns home to her apartment, and is presently terrified by the dripping of water, the creaking of doors. Before much time passes, she, too, dies; the next morning, other apartment dwellers find her and call the police. The caretaker tells the police she shooed everyone away and has touched nothing, knowing how the police work.
But the ring is gone, and madness is entering the eyes of the caretaker…
The second story concerns a classic stalker, first the phone ringing with no one on the other end. The terrified woman answering the phone finally entices the caller into speaking: it’s Frank. As in Frank, who died six months ago. Their connection? She stole him from another woman, whom she now calls, begging for help. Would I call her in the same situation? No, no, no! But she does, and the woman done wrong shows up as if … the plot requires it. Soon, the first woman falls asleep. Will there now be vengeance? Can the second woman speak like Frank?
No.
Frank himself breaks into the apartment silently, and strangles the woman done wrong. But the first woman has a knife and soon buries it in Frank. So now Frank is dead, which seems to distress the woman. Whoever she is. And how did Frank end up alive, before becoming dead again? We don’t know. Frank … ly, we don’t care.
The third story, starring Boris Karloff, involves a special breed of vampire called the Wurdalak, which only feasts on the blood of loved ones. Sounds horrific, doesn’t it? Lots of story potential. Oh, wait. What happens when you run out of loved ones? “I drained my wife last night and now I’m feeling a bit peckish. Oh, that’s right, I have a son for today’s meal. Hmmm, does the cousin count for tomorrow?” OK, let’s turn on the old “suspension of disbelief”… So, see, Boris’ 4th shepherd was murdered by a local bandit, so Boris decided it was time to kill the bandit; why it took 4 is not clear. But he tells his sons that if he’s not back in five days, he should be considered a Wurdalak and not permitted to come into the house; kill him if you can.
How does Boris know this? I dunno. It’s dumb.
So he comes back on the fifth day. Soon enough? Not soon enough? The sons don’t know, the wives or whatever they are, they won’t express much of anything, but that dog howling in the background, eh, he doesn’t get a vote. Then there’s this traveler who is going somewhere and has fallen in love with the, ah, buxom figure of one of the woman. Because, ah, you know, buxom. There ain’t no other reason for his sudden onset of love, I’m tellin’ ya.
Yeah, this isn’t going to end well.
If you adore Boris, sure, see it. It’s got bits of humor. But, really, it’s not worth it.
Postscript: I see in the Wikipedia entry that the Italian version of this is actually regarded rather highly. It may be worth seeking out that version, especially if it’s dubbed. Apparently this American version has been sculpted for the American sensibility of the early 1960s.
