Paul Naschy was a Spanish writer/actor/director who is most known for a series of horror films he made where he starred as a werewolf named Count Waldemar Daninsky. The films are mostly unconnected to one another except that he plays a werewolf with the same name, but there is no continuity to be found within them. I’ve seen a couple of them and quite enjoyed the watch. So much so that I found a collection of Naschy films boxed up in a Blu-ray set and put them on my wishlist for Christmas. My lovely wife bought them for me, and I opened them up tonight to start watching.
What I failed to recognize when I put this set on my wish list was that these films are just random Paul Naschy films, not a collection of his werewolf movies. Still, in for a penny, in for a pound, so I put on the first one and hoped for the best.
According to the liner notes (and Wikipedia), Naschy was told by the producers they wanted to make a film with him, but in order to do so, they needed a script ASAP. So he popped some pills and sat down to write, pounding out the script to Horror Rises from the Grave in 36 hours.
It definitely feels like a movie whose script was written in 36 hours. There is very little story to it, and it plays like Naschy just took every horror movie he loved and blended them together. Then added copious amounts of gore effects and enough naked breasts to make Cinemax on a Saturday night blush.
Still, it is pretty fun to watch.
It begins in medieval times, where a warlock called Alaric de Marnac (Paul Naschy) and his witch companion Mabille de Lancre (Helga Line) are executed (he has his head chopped off, she is burned alive) for Satanism.
Flash forward to the present, and a group of young people, including Hugo de Marnac (also Paul Naschy) head out to Hugo’s ancestral grounds, where a psychic medium told them the bones of Alaric de Marnac are buried. They figure it will be fun to dig up an old warlock (also there might be treasure).
Naturally, they find the bones. Naturally, when they do, all hell breaks loose. But it is a strange sort of hell. This is where the rushed script becomes apparent. Eventually old Alaric de Marnac will rise from the grave, but first his severed head seems to mesmerize some local townsfolk, and then some of Hugo’s friends, where they go about killing everyone in sight. Later, some of those dead folks will rise, zombie-like, and wreak havoc. Alaric de Marnac takes a couple of our heroes as slaves, and one pretty (and scantily clothed) lady has her blood drained onto the bones of Mabille de Lancre, which brings her back to life.
The movie pretty much exists so that our villains can kill our heroes with full gruesomeness and pretty ladies can run around in sheer nightgowns taking their tops off (with echoes of the vampire films of Jean Rollin). It does do both of those things very well, so who am I to complain? There are some interesting transitions, and the gore effects are good. It is goofy and dumb, but if you like that sort of thing, this film is pretty fun.
One of the bonus features on my Blu-ray is a selection of alternate “clothed” scenes. Some theaters in Spain at the time didn’t allow nudity, so they shot those scenes twice, once without clothes once with them on. I thought that was pretty funny.
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