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Review
by
Brian Lindsey
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5
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4 |
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10
= Highest Rating |
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There's
a lot more sleaze than sleuthing in this 1971
giallo from director Fernando Di Leo, who puts
the emphasis squarely on nudity and sex rather
than any mystery/thriller elements. When the cast
includes such scrumptious Eurobabes as Rosalba
Neri (Lady
Frankenstein) and Margaret Lee (Circus
of Fear) I can't really blame him. So what
if the plot is wafer thin, that the execution
leaves something to be desired? Rosalba and Margaret
— plus a couple other
gals — get naked
and kinky... a lot! I'm like there, dude.
Before we can get to the good
stuff, however, there's a pointlessly long and
boring opening sequence to endure. For nearly
five solid minutes we follow a masked figure,
clad in a black cape, skulking about the grounds
and then interior of a large manor house at night.
(I almost expected him to stop for a piss at some
point.) The house is actually a posh sanitarium
for wealthy women suffering from a variety of
neuroses. One of the patients, Cheryl (Lee, she
of the pouty Angelina Jolie lips) is obviously
the intended target. She's unknowingly saved from
death when she rings for an orderly, scaring off
the intruder. He'll be back, however. In the meantime
we're introduced to more of the patients and some
of the staff, to include voracious nymphomaniac
Anna (Neri), whose sex-crazed behavior derives
from an incestuous relationship she had with her
brother, and Dr. Clay (Klaus Kinski), a suspicious-acting
shrink. Kinski, the "wild man" of European exploitation
films, is uncharacteristically restrained in Slaughter
Hotel, looking quite bored in the kind
of role typically assigned the bland leading man-type
like George Hilton. He's mainly on hand for marquee
value — that, and to look shady. I mean, there
simply has to be something not quite right
about a chain-smoking doctor with a hippie hairdo
like that, right?
Our 'Phantom of the Clinic'
finally returns in the last half hour, embarking
on a killing spree as if to make up for lost time.
(What? You thought this was just a sex flick?)
Snatching up various implements of death from
the sanitarium's conveniently handy display case,
the caped intruder offs patients and nurses with
savage abandon. Even the killer's unmasking fails
to stop the carnage, as the culprit goes berserk
and — well, seeing is believing. The film's final
few minutes are both silly and shocking in equal
measure.
Okay... so it might be straining
credulity just a smidgen to think that someone
would renovate an old chateau for use as a mental
clinic and purposefully leave all that medieval
weaponry lying about. It's also hard to swallow
that the killer, having just committed multiple
homicides in a single night, would be stupid enough
to remain hidden in the house — with the intent
to strike again — after the police have
been summoned. But the mystery and its resolution,
even the murder sequences, are placed way down
on the list of priorities here. This film is primarily
about women getting nude and lascivious, whether
it's Neri brazenly stripping off her clothes to
seduce the sanitarium's gardener (whose "I could
get fired!" defense crumbles rather quickly),
a lesbian nurse giving extra special 'attention'
to one her patients, or Lee writhing naked in
bed. There are even two brief hardcore porn shots
of female masturbation (though a 'vulva double'
was used for Rosalba Neri's diddling scene).
So if
you're in a prurient mood — as opposed to craving
edge-of-your-seat thrills or a puzzling whodunit
— Slaughter Hotel
(AKA Asylum Erotica, the much better title)
may be just what the doctor ordered.
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Sadly,
Shriek Show's DVD edition of Slaughter
Hotel is a case of defeat snatched from
the jaws of victory. It comes with a decent selection
of extras, including trailers, a photo gallery,
an interview with director Di Leo (who died shortly
afterwards), and an alternate scene. The film
itself looks very, very good. I have no real complaints
to register concerning the visual quality of the
anamorphic widescreen transfer. It's just a cryin'
shame about the audio — the mono track employed
here is nothing short of disastrous.
Now I'm not being an
anal retentive perfectionist... I can live with
the occasional crackle and pop. Flat-sounding
mono mixes are also the norm for the vast majority
of European genre films from the '60s and '70s
that make it to Region 1 Land. We Euro-Cult fans
are just happy to get our sweaty mitts on 'em,
even if they aren't tricked out to take full advantage
of a great stereo system. The Slaughter
Hotel disc is guilty of these infractions
to be sure but neither transgression is a deal
breaker. The truly inexcusable blunder is to be
found in unlucky Chapter 13, representing the
worst case of botched audio I've heard to date.
(And I've screened a lot of DVDs, y'all.) In one
of the film's key murder scenes a patient is killed
by a crossbow bolt fired through the window of
her room. During this sequence — in which we see
the victim being hit, the body slumping to the
floor and her companion screaming in horror —
we actually hear other characters discussing the
murder after it has occurred; it's the
same dialog repeated (in its proper chronological
order) about a minute later in the film. What
the bloody hell???
How does something like
this happen? Whether due to sloppy authoring or
even a fault with the source material, for the
life of me just I don't understand how SS could
let this slide. Better to have simply left the
scene soundless, with a caveat to the viewer about
a minute of missing audio, then to present it
as is.
4/26/04
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