Revenge of the Blood Beast

We have a soft spot in our hearts for Michael Reeves’ first full job of feature directing. We Yanks know it primarily as The She-Beast, and its two classier-sounding Italo titles are La sorella di Satana and Il lago di Satana.   This English disc sells it under its exploitative U.K. title, Revenge of the Blood Beast. It’s All-Region, or Region-Free — it plays just fine in domestic U.S. Blu-ray players.

Stuck with the rep of being the James Dean of horror directors, Michael Reeves made only three movies before an early death. The movies are uneven but certainly equal to or better than the majority of competing horror work by American-International and the Euro-horror crowd. The second half of the 1960s saw a general depression in horror, with Hammer losing some its edge and continental fare turning to sex content to generate interest. Reeves’ second film The Sorcerers offers an intriguing science fiction concept, and the premise of his final horror picture Witchfinder General qualifies it as legitimate historical fiction.

Way back in 2007 the Dark Sky label released a widescreen DVD of The She-Beast. Raro Video put out an excellent Blu-ray in 2016 under the alternate title Il lago di Satana, restoring the film’s full anamorphic ‘Cromoscope’ dimensions. The movie has major limitations imposed by budget and commercial necessity, yet it’s an honorable production all the way. We can tell that the filmmaker has ambition.

Reeves partnered with the freewheeling producer Paul Maslansky, after helping on Maslansky’s Italian-made feature  The Castle of the Living Dead. The producer would eventually make a fortune with an endless series of Police Academy comedies. Reeves’ screen story shows a keen awareness of Eurohorror to date, and doesn’t try anything too original. Most importantly, he designed it to be dirt-cheap to film. Maslansky presumably had good producing connections in Italy, having served as a unit manager for Charles Schneer’s  Jason and the Argonauts. Reeves’ movie would film both in Italy, and across the border in Yugoslavia.

Revenge of the Blood Beast begins with the execution of a monstrously ugly witch, two centuries ago in an Eastern European village. As in numerous previous ’60s Eurohorrors, the witch puts a curse on her tormentors. We flash forward to recent times to join newlyweds Philip and Veronica (Ian Ogilvy and Barbara Steele) as they tour the area, now a Communist country with a depressed economy. They briefly meet the lecherous innkeeper Ladislav Groper (Mel Welles) and a local scientist, Count von Helsing (John Karlsen).  ←  A descendant of the famous vampire hunter, Von Helsing tries to interest the couple in his occult studies.

After catching Groper peeping at them, Philip and Veronica leave. They crash their Volkswagen into a lake — the very same place where the witch was killed centuries before. When he comes to, Philip discovers that the body recovered from his car is not Veronica but a hideous creature, which returns to life and begins killing. Groper and a truck driver try to hide these facts from the locality’s humorless secret policemen, while Von Helsing convinces Philip that the monster-woman is really Veronica, possessed by the legendary witch.

That synopsis isn’t exactly ripe with possibilities, yet Revenge of the Blood Beast is an amusing and entertaining light horror offering. Reeves’ direction is very good; he makes the most of his widescreen format and overcomes many of the limitations of his budget. In many ways the no-frills production betters Roger Corman’s impoverished runaway ‘Filmgroup’ movies made in Puerto Rico, Greece and Yugoslavia. Reeves had access to a few dirt roads, a tourist hotel that’s something of a glorified motel, and a water reservoir that can stand in for a haunted lake. The movie plays out on a small scale, but the script is nicely tailored to the resources available.

Star Barbara Steele was reportedly hired for a single day, which is made possible by a script that contrives for her character to appear only for a few scenes at the beginning and one at the end. One compliment for director Reeves is that the newlyweds seem a real English couple, even with the breakneck shooting schedule. They’re a horror version of the proto-Yuppies of Stanley Donen’s Two for the Road. The domestic scenes work more than well enough — Reeves knows how to stage normal dialogue and relationship interaction. Reeves’ acknowledged mentor was the action thriller specialist Don Siegel. Of Siegel’s films Blood Beast most resembles The Big Steal, a murderous Mexican road picture that nevertheless maintains a breezy screwball attitude.

Not a laugh riot, but some jokes are funny.Revenge of the Blood Beast is not a farce like the Corman-Poe comedies. It has a broad tongue-in-cheek quality and an awareness of ‘genre givens.’ The newlyweds discuss Transylvanian lore as they deal with Count von Helsing’s claim that a real witch haunts the vicinity. Reeves’ best quality may be his visual eye, for despite the low budget context every shot looks good and is nicely composed. Judicious camera angles make the witch-monster come across much better than it does in stills; one scene where the dead-alive hag and an unconscious Philip occupy adjoining tables in Groper’s kitchen looks forward to Polanski’s The Fearless Vampire Killers.

Reviewers looking for relevant content make sure to cite even broader comedy material involving bumbling secret police and lame chase footage. The best thing about this padding is that there’s not too much of it. The gentle ribbing of the moronic ‘commie stooges’ comes off rather well. Michael Reeves takes sole writing credit (under the name Michael Byron) but famed Roger Corman scribe Charles B. Griffith is reportedly responsible for much of the second-unit shoot. Frankly, we recognize Griffith’s sick hipster comedy vibe more in the sequences at the inn, especially those with Mel Welles, who was a leading player in Griffith’s comedy masterpiece The Little Shop of Horrors. Welles was a director in his own right ( Lady Frankenstein) and reportedly did second-unit work on Blood Beast too.

Good angles and cutting in the car chase scenes help as well, although one telltale gag (presumed to be Griffith’s doing) doesn’t pan out. A black-clothed man on a red motor scooter keeps popping up throughout the final chase, like a ‘margin gag’ from an old Mad magazine. We wait patiently for the punch line — are the roads overrun with identical red scooters? Is the guy Dracula?  But no comedy capper joke surfaces. Was this Paul Maslansky’s apprenticeship for those Police Academy movies?

←  One silly throwaway gag always gets a mention, even though it makes Blood Beast sound dumber than Police Academy. When the maniac possessed-Veronica-witch discards the hand scythe with which she has slaughtered a victim, it falls across a mallet forming a familiar hammer-and-sickle Communist symbol. The comedy satirists of  Rocky & Bullwinkle needn’t fear the competition.

The moody Ms. Steele couldn’t have been too upset working a 20-hour ‘1 day’ gig, because she seems perfectly happy playing her sexy scenes with Ian Ogilvy. Reeves stages a couple of gory moments but the movie overall is not particularly scary. We care for the distraught Philip and hope he escapes the Keystone Commissar Kops, avoids the angry Groper and recovers his raven-haired bride.

We admit to be impressed by low-budget productions that achieve a lot with very little, even if the level of artistic ambition isn’t the highest. In this handsome presentation, Blood Beast doesn’t quite balance its grim flashback story with the modern-day material, but it never insults the intelligence — and it is far better than its low rating on the IMDB. Definitely a screwball horror thriller, Blood Beast has nothing whatsoever to be ashamed of.