In the early Seventies, there was a certain buzz about a real gonzo Spanish gore-horror flick that was so extreme and dark that its director jumped to his death right after shooting wrapped.   Like most "buzz," it's probably only partially true, but the film remained a must-have amongst cult European horror movie fans.  Now, thanks to DVD, we can see an almost complete version of this nearly underground film, complete with the infamous slaughterhouse scene, and, after viewing it, our reaction is...

By HARVEY F. CHARTRAND

A Bell From Hell (1973) doesn't hang together, but it sure does hang separately.

I was very impressed with this Spanish horror film, even though it's a bit of a mess and the story doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. But what expert scene setting, acting, editing and cinematography!

As a HORROR-WOOD contributor, I must write about A Bell From Hell horror quotient. Oh yes, I know the film has a political subtext, that it was shot in Spain during the dying days of the fascist regime of Generalissimo Francisco Franco, and was viewed as an attack on the country’s bourgeoisie, which supported and perpetuated the dictatorship for four decades.

A Bell From Hell has a sinister real-life history. Its 33-year-old director Claudio Guerín Hill died the day before shooting wrapped. He may well have been murdered by Franco’s secret police, thrown from the bell tower in Noia, Galicia, that figures so prominently in the narrative. The film was completed by Juan Antonio Bardem, who directed the psycho-thriller, The Corruption Of Chris Miller (1973).

But right now I’m here to review A Bell From Hell as an exercise in horror, not as an artfully disguised anti-Franco tract, although the political message may have been too overt, as it led to unwanted attention from Franco’s security forces and to the untimely death of a talented young director. Unless one believes that Hill’s fall was an accident or a suicide, it appears to be a classic case of an overconfident rebel who went looking for trouble and found it in spades.

We’ll probably never know the whole truth behind this sad episode in Spanish film history or what accounted for the premature demise of a filmmaker who would likely have evolved into a leading exponent of Eurohorrotica as an art form.

A Bell From Hell is Hill’s only major genre film, and even so it is not entirely his work, as Bardem handled the editing chores. Which means that Hill’s reputation as a horror director rests on only one partially directed film. With 3½ pictures to his credit, Michael Reeves (Witchfinder General), who also died young, is almost prolific by comparison.

A Bell From Hell opens with twenty-something John (Renaud Verley) being temporarily released from a mental hospital. John hops on his motorcycle and, like any sane man would, heads for the nearest slaughterhouse. We see the actor Verley actually killing live animals on camera. He hacks away at the back of a cow’s neck with a spike. Blood spurts in all directions.

The thrashing animals are hosed down while their still moving limbs are hacked off and their jaws shattered by hammer blows. I repeat: this is all happening while the beasts are still alive! The soundtrack swells with the hideous death rattle of cows being skinned and eviscerated. It’s like seeing Pablo Picasso’s Guernica mural come to horrible life.

Verley isn’t a bad actor, but he can’t get into character for this scene. For whatever artistic reasons, Hill insisted that we see John rehearsing future murders by butchering cattle. Verley cannot hide his revulsion at what the director is asking him to do in the name of surrealism. The scene works, though. It is shocking and disgusting. How could it be anything else?

John quits his job in the abattoir after only one day, telling the paymaster he has learned enough. John then returns to the family estate run by his dear old wheelchair-bound Aunt Marta (Viveca Lindfors), who controls the family fortune as long as he is deemed to be of unsound mind. Apparently, Aunt Marta was responsible for John’s incarceration, worried that his years of debauchery outside the country would taint the family name. She has also managed to obtain control of the inheritance left John by his mother. (We see her in home movies; she comes across as rather bohemian and perhaps mentally unstable).

Crusty but well-preserved Aunt Marta lives very comfortably on the estate with her three comely daughters. John seduces and plays elaborate practical jokes on his cousins – free spirit Esther (Maribel Martín), calculating Teresa (Nuria Gimeno) and sexy but vapid María (the bodacious Christine Betzner, whose only screen appearance this is).

John plays a very sick joke on a former flame, an older woman married to local grandee Don Pedro (Alfredo Mayo), a shifty-eyed contractor who eventually turns the tables on John, although Don Pedro doesn’t get the last laugh. At first perverse and mischievous, John demonstrates more signs of mental aberration as his jokes degenerate into acts of pure derangement: He pretends to be injured, wearing an arm cast and braces, and gets Don Pedro to hold his penis while he urinates in a public toilet.

John pretends to rip out his eyes Oedipus-style in front of Don Pedro’s wife, who faints at the sight of the empty sockets and bleeding orbs held aloft. John booby-traps his renovated quarters (the home of his mother, who killed herself rather than live among the stiflingly oppressive bourgeoisie). John fills his lodgings with birds and wild animals, makes a latex-masked mechanical replica of himself, plays a church organ like a latter-day Captain Nemo, and installs an in-house abattoir in his basement (which resembles a dungeon from the time of the Spanish Inquisition).

Worst of all, John smears Aunt Marta’s face with honey and leaves her outside with a swarm of bees that he has released from their hives. At this point, all audience identification with the rebellious and wronged young man ceases. He really is mad after all – possibly driven to it, but barking mad nonetheless! This is confirmed when John later dangles his three nude cousins (two of whom he has enjoyed sexual congress with!) from pulleys – slaughterhouse-style.

The lurid third act is like a plot strand lifted from an Edgar Allan Poe movie, reminding the viewer of such tales of the grotesque and arabesque as The Pit And The Pendulum and The Cask Of Amontillado.

Among the dramatis personae of A Bell From Hell is a Tolkienesque man of the woods, a pagan who serves as a link to the distant past of medieval Spain. One of the strangest scenes in A Bell From Hell is the one where John visits a hollowed-out tree trunk and hears an old man’s voice seemingly coming from nowhere. It turns out the elderly man, whose face is framed by branches and leaves, isn’t a hallucination.

The mysterious psychic bond between John and the woodsman is never explained. John later rescues the old man’s mute daughter from four middle-aged hunters who are intent on raping the pubescent girl during a hunting party--the most politically overstated scene in the picture.

A Bell from Hell is oddly fascinating, but I can’t say it’s the least bit scary. It is however very exotic--rich and strange, if you will.

The ugly-handsome French actor Verley is best known for a few leading roles in late-sixties Eurofilms (including André Cayatte’s The Road To Katmandu and Luchino Visconti’s The Damned). Verley hasn’t worked much in film since the mid-eighties, preferring the world of Parisian dinner theatre.

Brought to Hollywood from Sweden in the late forties as a Greta Garbo type, Lindfors is cited by horror enthusiasts for her co-starring role with Boris Karloff in Blind Man’s Bluff/Cauldron Of Blood (1967), also filmed in Spain. Years later, Lindfors played Frankenstein's Aunt (1987) and had supporting roles in Creepshow (1982), The Exorcist III (1990) and Stargate (1994). She died in 1995.

A Bell From Hell screenwriter, Santiago Moncada, scripted Mario Bava’s Hatchet for the Honeymoon (1970), The Corruption Of Chris Miller, Cut-Throats Nine (1972), and Voodoo Black Exorcist (1973). Moncada also came up with the story for Sergio Martino’s classic giallo All The Colors Of The Dark (1972).

Until I saw A Bell From Hell, I had never heard of Alfredo Mayo, but this veteran actor worked steadily in Spanish cinema from 1935 until his death in 1985. Mayo delivers a robust performance in A Bell From Hell, full of complex shadings revealing his character’s inner moral conflict – his capacity for great evil and equally intense remorse after the fact. Mayo displays an impressive range in the harrowing final scenes of Don Pedro’s entrapment in John’s villa as he is caught up in a revenge scheme from beyond the grave.

Pathfinder Home Entertainment has done a fine job of restoring this Iberian horror’s visual splendor and sound quality. Unfortunately, the folks at Pathfinder were unable to unearth the original 106-minute cut of A Bell From Hell. However, this 92-minute version appears to be complete, restoring several nude scenes, as well as the graphic and truly nauseating abattoir sequence.

A final observation: Why does everyone refer to the film as A Bell from Hell when the onscreen title is The Bells--which is inaccurate, as there is only the one bell hoisted up the church steeple and directly linked to the unhappy fate of the anti-hero protagonist?

I dare not say more, for then I would spoil the surprise of a truly original murder.

Thanks, Harv.  And it is a pretty jolting surprise, indeed.  Weird, wacky, subversive, excessive, grisly, darkly poetic...all are applicable to A Bell From Hell.  Despite its annoying lapses into the surreal and the disjointed nature of its storyline, it is a ferociously original horror film, and not one for the easily offended.  It's not for everyone, certainly, and might not even be suitable for a lot of folks who read our Webzine, but some will find it absolutely riveting and inspired.  All we can add is, watch it if you will...and if you dare.

Article copyright © Harvey F. Chartrand

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