Devil's Nightmare (Jean Brismée, 1971)

Like the movie in my previous post (The Devil's Wedding Night), Devil's Nightmare is another slice of early '70s sex- and violence-filled European castle weirdness with a possessive devil in the title (the two films even shared a triple bill with In the Devil's Garden on their initial U.S. release), and I am, as the 40-year-old teens on social media say, here for it. Unlike The Devil's Wedding Night, which was about vampires, the devil actually shows up in the Belgian/Italian coproduction Devil's Nightmare, alongside a busload of wacky tourists, a succubus, and a cursed old Nazi general/baron-turned-alchemist and his butler. We're talking the perfect ingredients for one crazy night, my friends.

In an unusual move for a sexy Satanic '70s castlesploitation flick, Devil's Nightmare opens with black-and-white footage of the bombing of Berlin in 1945. The B&W continues in a pre-credits flashback sequence in which Baron von Rhoneberg (Jean Servais, whose other credits include Rififi, Le Plaisir, Fever Mounts at El Pao, and The Longest Day), also a Nazi general, nervously awaits the birth of his firstborn child during the bombing. His wife is not doing well, despite being attended to by a nurse (Frédérique Hender). She dies in childbirth but the baby is born healthy, though the Baron is extremely dismayed that the newborn is a daughter and not a son. We suspect this isn't just standard-issue misogyny from the worried and knowing looks the Baron and his butler Hans (Maurice de Groote) keep giving each other. Hans ushers the nurse to the basement for shelter, which gives the Baron the opportunity to quickly christen his daughter before killing her with a big-ass knife. We find out why later.

Kablammo! A creepy castle appears in vivid color and the opening credits roll. A strange and exciting scene that has little to do with the plot (love when this happens) ensues, though we do learn that the Baron and Hans are living in a castle in the Belgian countryside and they don't want the castle to be photographed.

Cue the tour bus. A small, ragtag group of Euro-misfits on a tour of the castles of Belgium runs into some trouble when the usual country road leading to the next castle is closed, but we'll circle back to that. I want to introduce our tourists first. Mason (Lucien Raimbourg) is a sour-tempered elderly man who frequently smokes a pipe and always complains. Mason is hilariously pissed off about everything all the time, and his lines being dubbed in English by someone clearly much younger than him makes him even funnier. Alvin Sorel (Jacques Monseau) is a Catholic seminary student soon to become a priest. He's already wearing the collar. Alvin is a devoutly religious young man, but he's also overly confident about his devoutness and priestly skills, and he's a little too proud of how great he is at playing chess. Nancy (Colette Emmanuelle) is an unhappily married wealthy woman who fiendishly craves even more wealth, and her husband Howard (Lorenzo Terzon) is an unfaithful playboy who can't stop pursuing every woman in his eyesight. Corinne (Ivana Novak) is a bisexual seductress who has her sights on both Howard and Regine (Shirley Corrigan), a blonde bombshell in hot pants who is passively receptive to the sexual attention but is mostly super into lounging in bed, napping, taking long relaxing baths, and sleeping. Finally, our tour bus driver Ducha (Christian Maillet) is a hardcore glutton who never stops eating and drinking wine. His bedside reading is a cookbook, his suitcase contains several smoked meats and cheeses, and he even tears into a chicken (or possibly turkey) leg while driving. I mean, he goes to town on the damn thing.

Back to the road closure. Ducha pauses his poultry bite to slam on the brakes, angering Mason, who gives him the business. The passengers see a bald, thin figure with long teeth in the woods, tending to a fire and grinning creepily. (This thin man is the wonderfully named Daniel Emilfork, a character acting legend who was the go-to guy in European cinema from 1955 until 2006 when anyone needed a bald, thin creepy guy with weird teeth and a magnetic screen presence.) Ducha rolls down his window and asks the creepily grinning man how to get around the blocked road. The man tells them to turn around, head back toward the village, and take a right at a different castle. This castle is not part of the tour, but the owners will provide shelter for the night until the road is reopened. They take the weird guy's advice, which is bad for them but great for us.

After some mishaps involving a falling stone gargoyle face, a large frog, and inappropriate flirting with a hot pants babe in front of your spouse, the gang enters the castle, meets Hans and the castle's unfriendly cook, and is shown into their rooms. Each room has something weird going on (I'm not just talking about the late-'60s/early-'70s-as-fuck wallpaper and carpeting), and Hans is more than happy to tell the sordid history of who died in that room, what year the death occurred, and how it happened. This scares Regine enough that she requests to share a room. Corinne hornily offers hers. Cue some '70s softcore Euro-sex between one of the horniest women in Belgium and one of the laziest.

The Baron makes his appearance at dinnertime and talks about his alchemist lab in the basement and the centuries-old curse on his family. You know, the usual small talk. The alchemist lab talk gets greedy Nancy all hot and bothered, and she asks for a tour after dinner. The woman has a fever and the only prescription is more gold. (Devil's Nightmare takes it as a given that you can turn lead into gold. Just roll with it.)

Dinner is rolling along swimmingly when there is an unexpected knock on the door. The cook answers, recognizes the visitor, Lisa (Erika Blanc), with horror, and refuses to let her in. Hans butts in, overrides the cook (I'd credit the actress but I can't find her in the listed credits online), and tells Lisa she can come in and stay in the remaining spare bedroom. She joins the gang mid-meal in some atypical dinnerwear, a very revealing dress with a large oval cutout from the bottom of her breasts to just below her navel. She sits next to the seminarian and starts flirting. Could this be a succubus? Or just a really weird sexy lady?

Erika Blanc (real name Enrica Bianchi Colombatto), who plays Lisa, is a strikingly memorable Italian actress with a slew of credits during the golden age of the European exploitation/genre/b-movie era, appearing in dozens of Italian horror films, spaghetti westerns, non-porn erotica, and crime thrillers (many of which have incredible English-language titles), including Mario Bava's Kill, Baby... Kill!, Django Shoots First, Vengeance Is My Forgiveness, Will Our Heroes Be Able to Find their Friend Who Has Mysteriously Disappeared in Africa?, A Man for Emmanuelle, Sartana's Here... Trade Your Pistol for a Coffin, The Night Evelyn Came out of the Grave, Stay Away from Trinity... When He Comes to Eldorado, Love and Death in the Garden of the Gods, A Dragonfly for Each Corpse, and The Naked Doorwoman, just to name a few.

Once almost every character is in place at the castle (Satan shows up later but you may have already met him), the movie really kicks it up a notch. The succubus lures each tourist with his or her own deadly sin in genuinely creepy scenes that owe much of their effectiveness to Blanc's incredible performance, some top-notch freaky-ass makeup from makeup artists Nancy Beaudoux and Duilio Giustini (the movie's secret weapon), and the atmospherically spooky score from Morricone and Rota protégé Alessandro Alessandroni (also an expert whistler, Alessandroni is the guy whistling on many of the Morricone scores for Sergio Leone's westerns).

I had a blast with this movie. It's soaking in '70s Italian and Belgian atmosphere, the locations are perfect, the cast is excellent with tons of screen presence, it's sexy, it's scary, it's funny, the music's great, and there are no dead spots. Something interesting is happening in every scene, and the images have maximum impact, especially the closeups. I had even more fun with this one than I had with The Devil's Wedding Night.

Oddly enough, this is director Jean Brismée's only feature. I wish he'd made more. Primarily a screenwriter, Brismée's only other directing credits are educational short films about mathematics, science, and film history. He also cofounded a film school in Brussels whose graduates include several prominent international filmmakers, screenwriters, and actors, and he wrote a book about Belgian cinema in 1995. He died in 2024.

The Devil's Wedding Night (Luigi Batzella & Joe D'Amato, 1973)

Though the title's a bit of a misnomer (this is a vampire movie), The Devil's Wedding Night is an entertainingly campy bit of Gothic horror, despite the second half having too many pad-the-running-time scenes of characters wandering confusedly through a castle in the dark. Those scenes aside, we get some hilariously arch dialogue, knowingly heightened performances, one of those great scenes in an old-timey inn/tavern where the locals get weird when the out-of-towner says he's going to the spooky castle (I never get tired of that), blood, copious nudity, an amulet vs. ring accoutrement showdown, a Pazuzu namedrop (shoutout to Pazuzu and my fellow Exorcist II defenders), and lots of vampire action. It's a reasonably good '70s b-movie time.

The movie begins with playboy archeologist Karl (Mark Damon, in one of his final roles before he became a big-shot movie producer) in his cozy library/study, researching the existence of the Nibelungen in the ancient tomes. He's convinced the ring is is real, has been used by a succession of historical figures (Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, etc.) to control the world, and is most likely somewhere in the Carpathian Mountains in Transylvania at present. He impulsively decides to find it, seize it, and put it on permanent display at an archeological museum, where it will be free from the hands of men. This begs the question, if the ring is so powerful, wouldn't there be constant attempts to steal it from the museum? Maybe put it in a safe and bury it in a secret location?

Karl's twin brother Franz (also played by Damon) enters the study and begins razzing Karl with some poetry from hot new talent Edgar Allan Poe. Franz doubts the ring is real, but if it is, he thinks Karl should make some money off of it instead of donating it to a museum. He's also mildly concerned about Karl's impending journey to Transylvania, especially when Karl tells him he's going to Castle Dracula. Just in case vampires are real, Franz gives Karl an amulet that wards off their power and says he'll make the trip, too, if Karl gets in any trouble. Why does he have that amulet? These are some strange dudes.

Karl makes the long trip to Transylvania on horseback, where he fails to notice a creepy man in the woods smiling at him. He arrives at the inn, spooks the locals by asking about the castle, and orders a "very tall beer and a warm bed." The creepy smiling guy is there, too, but Karl again does not notice. The innkeeper's attractive daughter Tanya (Enza Sbordone) takes him to his room, where she warns him about vampires and tells him he's arrived the evening before the Night of the Virgin Moon. Every 50 years, five virgins make their way to the castle and never return. She's scared. Karl tells her vampires aren't real and he's got a pretty sweet amulet to ward them off if they are. He also apologizes about prioritizing his own safety "when (dramatic pause) I should be (dramatic pause) worried about (dramatic pause) yours." With each dramatic pause, Karl moves closer to the woman's lips. You don't need to be the Psychic Friends Network to know what happens next.

Fresh from bedding down Tanya, Karl hops on his horse and rides to Castle Dracula. Guess what? He left the amulet at the inn. (Oh shiiit!) A creepy servant named Lara (Esmeralda Barros) answers his knocking. He presents the lie that he's an architect studying the castles of Europe and would like a tour. She allows his entry and tells him the mistress of the house is away. Bored of waiting, Karl wanders the castle, checks out the crypt, and finally meets Countess Dracula (Rosalba Neri). After some amusing banter, they have a late dinner together. Karl does his best playboy seduction routine, the countess reciprocates with some hilarious dialogue that goes over Karl's head. Soon, they're knockin' boots, but the countess turns into a bat mid-coitus and gives Karl the ol' neck-chomp. Karl's one of the gang now. And, oh yes, the countess has the ring.

It's going to be a great Night of the Virgin Moon. The countess thinks Karl will make a fantastic new husband, and she can finally move on from the dear departed Count Dracula. First, she'll bathe in the blood of the five virgins with the assistance of Lara, a big bald vampire enforcer dude, and five hooded vampire men who will take the dead virgins as their coffin brides for the next half-century. Then, Karl will make a blood sacrifice of Tanya (kidnapped while attempting to bring the amulet to Karl), and the wedding will ensue. The countess and Karl will live happily ever after.

These plans are complicated when Franz shows up. Though Franz told his brother he'd make the trip if he heard that something went wrong, he seemingly left mere hours after his brother. I don't know if a scene explaining this quick move was cut from the print I watched or what. Whatever the case, the countess tells Franz his brother visited but abruptly left. She then asks him to stay the night and the creeping smiling guy brings some wine. Smiley guy turns into Lara, everyone starts cackling like mad, and Franz, Lara, and the countess possibly have a threesome, though this segment is so confusingly/artily edited that it may all be a hallucination in Franz's mind.

Unexpected brotherly visitations handled (sort of), the countess and her cohorts finally get the Virgin Moon ceremony underway, the important first step of which involves Lara ripping the tops off the virgins and rubbing their breasts. You may think this is gratuitous, but I believe in trusting the process. It's an important part of the ceremony and can't be skipped. Will the rest of the ceremony proceed as planned? What do you think?

As I mentioned earlier, there are too many minutes of one character or another walking through the dark castle in the second half of the film, but the rest of the pulpy, Gothy, vampy biz mostly makes up for the repetitive bits. The movie has so many of the '60s and '70s Euro-horror pleasures, and the cast know exactly what kind of movie they're in and pitch their performances accordingly. The ridiculous multiple-twist ending is pretty damn fun, too.

The Devil's Wedding Night credits list Paul Solvay as the director, though that name is an Americanized pseudonym for Luigi Batzella. Rosalba Neri said Batzella's direction seemed like two people "going different directions and rarely meeting." The producers must have reached the same conclusion, because wildly prolific Italian b-movie filmmaker Joe D'Amato (real name Aristide Massaccesi) was called in for extensive reshoots, which were extensive enough to see him credited as co-director years after the film's release. It doesn't hurt the movie much, and there are no wild clashes in visual style, though I'd like to know who to blame for the castle-wandering scenes. I have to mention this every time Joe D'Amato's name comes up, but he used dozens of pseudonyms over the course of his career, my favorite being his spaghetti western name: Arizona Massachuset.