Most early Euro-horror flicks weren't Bava masterpieces, but they were usually goofy and even sleazy fun.  Alas, there's at least one exception--a mid Sixties fright flick that provokes snores instead of screams.  Despite its exploitable storyline--nubile young women kidnapped and killed to make fleshy statutes for a madman--very little of it was exploited in the screenplay or on the screen.  In fact, it might well be said that this was...

By DAVE DUGGINS

Ah, it’s another glorious gem Renfield has psychically teleported into the dark depths of my secret review dungeon, kiddies. Another lost classic, a gem of horror cinema. If only more people knew about this, cinema macabre would be transformed forever –

Okay. Did any of you actually believe that? As Val Kilmer says in Tombstone, my hypocrisy only goes so far.

The Embalmer is crap. No two ways about it. I’ve seen worse (Voodoo Swamp, that little "extra" you get with your Blood Of The Zombie DVD, was far worse). Quite a few of the movies I’ve reviewed in these hallowed web pages are worse than The Embalmer, but that’s not really saying much, is it?

Our story takes place in lovely Venice, which is about all it has going for it. The Embalmer swims up from the depths of his underground (i.e. underwater) lair, dressed in full diving gear. He snatches girls off the cobblestone walkways and drags them down into his dungeon, where he embalms them alive. How he manages to get them through all those lengthy submerged passageways without drowning is never explained. Probably best not to think about it too much.

That aside, it’s not bad on paper, right?

The fundamental problem with this setup is that there is nothing even remotely scary about a guy in a wetsuit, complete with fins and scuba tanks. The mind flatly refuses to recoil in terror.

If they’d borrowed the deep-sea getup Ricou Browning used for The Creature From The Black Lagoon, it would have been a whole different story. When scuba guy menaces a woman walking home along the beautiful (if malodorous) Venetian canals, all she has to do is smear his mask and he’s done. "I’ll spirit you off to my evil hideaway--oh, hell, I’m blind." Not very threatening.

When he’s in full-on Embalmer mode, creeping around in his underground lair wearing a grim-reaper style cloak and hood, he does a little better. Still, how many times have we seen the dark cloak schtick done by real actors with real presence? Christopher Lee in his Dracula cape wins this contest hands down. If you’re not in that league, forget it.

There is one genuinely creepy moment in the first act. While our boy is working on his latest creation, we watch him talk to his embalmed victims. He soliloquizes (or monologues, as they call it in The Incredibles) them, waxing cheesily poetic. That’s pretty nasty–like Rob Zombie’s Living Dead Girl nasty. Luckily, the creepiness loses its verisimilitude when The Embalmer (it really deserves the capital letters, I think) reaches up to put his hands on the glass fronting his "trophy cases" – only there’s no glass there at all, and it’s painfully obvious. No glass, no tricky lighting problems. Very efficient.

Why is it that movies shot in Europe always have at least one travelogue section? Even if I’ve never been to Venice, all I need is one establishing shot and I’m with you. Hey, I don’t mind travel documentaries, but not in the middle of my horror flick, thank you very much. I like hot chocolate and iced tea, but I don’t want them forced down my throat mixed together.

In this "let me show you around" sequence, our hero--an intrepid reporter at the local newspaper who is convinced that the murders are the work of a monster--actually jumps on a tour boat with a bunch of cuties and provides the commentary! It’s a stapled-together clutter of medium shots that does absolutely nothing for the story. Boring, flat and dry, like...well, like cereal filler. Which is what it is. Funny, that.

Stilted, unrealistic dialogue, anyone? You’ll find it here. This, I’m thinking, is not simply bad dubbing, but bad dubbing of a bad script. We learn more than we need to know about Venice through a series of character exchanges that are just one step this side of, "As you know, Bill, the vampire only kills when his hunger drives him to completely drain the blood of his victim." In a visual medium, talking heads chatting in a hotel lobby is the worst possible way to get backstory across.

Add to this one more intolerable "tour guide" sequence featuring perfectly composed footage of Venice (yes, it has canals for streets, I think I’ve got it now), and you have the basic ingredients for soporific drudgery. And we’re still in Act One! Here I was thinking it was Act Two that usually has all the padding.

Next up is a terrific scene in a jazz bar, complete with a very hepcat horn section. Jazz is featured heavily in the score, which of course is (can you guess?) not remotely scary. Now I’m really thinking of good old Barry Mahon, the weekend genius behind the aforementioned Blood Of The Zombie. Barry was clearly influenced by the cinema of Dino Tavella. Soulmates, separated by continents, oceans and time. But brothers in mediocrity. It’s almost touching. But not really.

In the place where you would normally find the end of act one, we have an Italian Elvis instead of a plot point. I’m a guitar player myself, which only hurts me when watching movies in which the actor obviously doesn’t play and the music is overdubbed. In this case, my three-year-old son would quickly pick up on the fact that the guy is just moving his right hand really fast across the strings and hoping nobody notices that the chords he’s playing aren’t even in the song.

Immediately following this atrocity, we finally get to the plot point at the end of Act One, which is another attack on a woman at the hands of The Embalmer, dressed in his trademark, completely unscary wetsuit. The only problem with this is that we’ve already seen him grab three other women, so the importance of this moment is somewhat diluted by repetition (quite literally in this case, as actual footage from the earlier attack sequences is reused).

The cops arrive two seconds later, as all movie cops do. Our intrepid reporter is the next guy to show up, still running around crowing, "Don’t you believe me yet?" Poor guy. His story is too stupid to be true. Unfortunately, scriptwriters Tavella and Antonio Walter didn’t realize this.

An annoying autobiographical aside: I meet a lot of people who seem to think it ought to be easy to write a novel or screenplay. I’ve written both and found them very challenging. Writing well--writing professionally-- is no easier than any job requiring technical skill and experience. Nobody expects some guy off the street to be able to walk into a hospital and perform an appendectomy. Why is it that some people think all you have to do to be a writer is pick up a pen?

This script was written by non-writers. I’d stake my reputation on it (which is no big deal, since I don’t have one).

At about the forty-minute mark, we are treated to a truly puerile and rather random moment of voyeurism involving a female tourist and a hotel employee. It’s in bad taste, isn’t prurient and, again, does absolutely nothing for the story. Besides, it’s boring. The chick doesn’t even get naked. What a waste.

Hey, I wouldn’t want you to think I was getting too serious here...the last movie I reviewed featured a lesbian love scene, after all. You want to get your money’s worth out of these things.

After all that, something finally happens. Unfortunately, it’s a typical "creatively staged" horror movie death, all of which pale to insignificance in comparison to The Abominable Dr. Phibes, the no-holds-barred all-time winner of the Creative Death in Horror Movies Achievement Award. And never mind that Il Mostro di Venezia was actually made six years prior to the good doctor’s appearance. Since the deaths are based on the seven plagues of Egypt, the rule still applies.

I always feel sorry for people who try to do something that has already been done, seemingly unaware that you are absolutely required to do better than your predecessor in order to succeed (the makers of Deep Blue Sea, for example, clearly never even watched ten minutes of Jaws).

The Embalmer doesn’t do anything better than anything else. It probably sucks better than your average vacuum cleaner, but I haven’t tested that theory. I’ll get back to you.

Yards and yards of endlessly tedious tour guide footage later, we finally land feet-first in Act Three, where – against my better judgement--I desperately hoped for something cool to happen. These vain hopes often cripple me, I’ve discovered.

Something happened, all right. Something boring. Here’s the scenario: boatload of pretty girls, one intrepid reporter (for ballast, I suppose) and one crazy guy in a wetsuit. It’s a smorgasbord, right? That’s for sure what I was thinking. Here’s his chance to wax the dumb reporter who’s been trying to write newspaper stories about him and grab an entire gondola full of nubile young women, ripe for...embalming. Or whatever. Yeah.

How many girls does he get out of this deal? One. One girl! I firmly believe that any one of you, given five minutes and the offer of a free meal (or at least a free six-pack), could come up with a better third act than this. He could have gotten all the girls! Or at least four of them! Come on! One out of seven? That’s not even trying. And all of them cute. What are the chances? Nil outside of the movies, that’s for sure.

Act Three does feature my all-time favorite moment in the film. It’s not actually a part of the film; it’s part of the bad 16-millimeter transfer, economically dubbed to digital by the wonderful folks at Sinister Cinema.

Don’t get me wrong about the Sinister folks. They’re wonderful people who provide a valuable public service--well, a valuable service to me, anyway. The quality of the film certainly isn’t their fault, and the quality of the print probably isn’t either. You’ve gotta work with what you have.

Here, the print had been badly spliced at a reel change. What you get out of it is a wonderful three second burst of white screen and silence, after which the film resumes normally following a few stuttering frames. Amazing! The film actually broke and they just kept the DVD burner rolling. Captured for posterity. In a film of this quality, the moment actually elevates the whole thing. It also reminded me of those great drive-in days--when you halfway hoped the film would break. Wonderful stuff.

Horror movies with plots like this one are really thinly-disguised mysteries. Scream is probably the most accessible modern example of the whodunit dressed as horror flick. The killer attacks throughout the film, striking ever closer to the protagonist – but who is the killer? The structure of these stories dictates that you’re assailed by red herrings in the first two acts, so you’re kept guessing. The big reveal is in the third act, hopefully thrown at you from an unexpected angle, avoiding the obvious choice--the creepy guy who works the front desk at the tourist hotel, for instance.

Thankfully, in this movie, The Embalmer is not the creepy guy who works the front desk at the tourist hotel, effectively wasting two acts’ worth of exposition and rendering the whole formula useless. Instead, the killer is--someone I don’t recognize! I watched the entire film twice and I don’t know who this guy is. The Italian Elvis lounge singer, maybe?

Our heroic reporter obviously recognizes the killer, but I didn’t. Is he the bigger of the two bickering porters? Here’s a switch--I’m not offering a spoiler because I can’t. If you figure it out, drop me an email. I’m actually sort of curious about that.

A solid classic twist--the reporter actually being The Embalmer would have been fun--could have saved this from utter pointlessness. But no. Our plucky heroine descends into the dank sub-basements through a secret passageway built behind the fireplace (yes, I am serious) with a candelabra, although the intrepid reporter shows up with a five-cell flashlight five minutes later.

Maureen--played by Maureen Brown, another Barry Mahon-pilfered stroke of ingenuity--is a minor player in the first two acts, but most of the third act is devoted to her. She is then killed by The Embalmer before she has a chance to do anything except run and scream. All very disappointing.

The intrepid reporter finally reveals the killer’s identity, but he can’t even manage to kill the guy; the cops shoot the killer in the back while he and the reporter wrestle around on the ground. Also very disappointing, wrapping up a little less than 90 minutes’ worth of disappointing ineptitude, leaving very little to recommend.

I hope you had fun reading this, but if my Cliff’s Notes encapsulation makes you want to see it, con one of your friends into buying it for you. Some movies are fun because they’re bad, and some movies are just bad. Save your five bucks. This one’s the latter.

Thanks, Dave.  Definitely, The Embalmer pretty much comes up short on all the classic fright flick measures.   It may well have been a Barry Mahon cheapie done in Venice, except that it comes off more as Bava done on the cheap--at any rate, it just comes out cheap.  The only real "shocks" is that 1) the heroine gets killed and 2) that this flick was made in 1965--it has all the appearances of a a film made ten years earlier.  Worst, it doesn't even have the sleaze that one expects from a low-rent Euro-horror.  As it is, this film was "embalmed" before it was even released to theaters.  No wonder Ted V. Mikels picked it to fill out his later triple tawdry terror bill with The Undertaker And His Pals and The Corpse Grinders.

Article copyright © Dave Duggins

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