Slaughter Hotel (1971)

AKA Asylum Erotica
AKA Cold Blooded Beast
Directed by Fernando Di Leo
Starring Rosalba Neri, Klaus Kinski, Margaret Lee, Gioia Desideri
Rated R
Italy

"I never wanted to hurt myself or anybody else. I just want to make love!"

Once you get over the plot's initial skyscraper-high hurdle - that there's a crumbling castle somewhere out there on an Italian hillside that serves as a mental institution for bored, beautiful, and wealthy women - then all the pieces to Slaughter Hotel's weird puzzle start to fall into place. I mean, not seamlessly - for instance, it's not even a hotel, and none of the women appear to be actively mad, just distracted or sexually frustrated - but it all makes an elastic sort of sense, when you consider it was 1971, and a lot of people were on groovy drugs back then. In fact, that's exactly how Slaughter Hotel often feels - like you've just ingested some far-our party pill, and now you're just riding its wobbly waves to the end-credits.

The story? Scooby Doo meets Caligula, basically. A caped, hooded maniac haunts the halls of an upscale psych "hospital" situated halfway between nothing and nowhere. The killer is fond of medieval weapons. Luckily, the entire hospital is loaded with them. They dangle from every wall, and torture devices - including a very nasty-looking iron maiden - are stuffed into every corner. Not the most therapeutic decorating scheme for an asylum. The opening scene sets the stage for the killings-to-come, as the hooded maniac peers at a fully-nude Margaret Lee, thrashing on her bed in feverish sleep. Luckily for her, the nurses start their morning rounds seconds before the killer is able to strike.

By the way, it should be noted that the skulking, hooded, axe-wielding, shadows-throwing villain happens to be a deadringer for the murderous mice in that one Looney Tunes cartoon where Porky Pig and Sylvester spend the night at a supposedly haunted hotel.

The light of day brings the more familiar horrors of croquet and half-assed 'therapy' that largely consists of booze-chugging and cigarette smoking. It's an eventful day at the ol' slaughter hotel, thanks to the arrival of Ruth (Gioia Desideri), a woman clearly suffering from some on-again, off-again impulse control disorder, as evidenced on the ride in, when she suddenly lunged for the steering wheel, panicking her husband ("Killing me is one thing, but why commit suicide?") and when she tried to club the intake doc with a tree branch. Incidentally, her hubby is not prize, either: when they arrive at the hospital, he tosses her fur coat at her, grunting, "I'll be back for you on Monday" as he speeds off in his convertible.

German meltdown legend Klaus Kinski and his hippy-freak haircut suddenly pops up out of nowhere as head doctor Francis Clay. Sadly, he doesn't do much besides smoke and sneer at the idiocy of the dialogue. Although he is often featured as the main attraction in ads and posters for the film, Kinski's role in Slaughter Hotel is fairly minimal. And, sadly, he's not the killer. Or is he?

No, he's not.

At this point, the real star of this event makes her entrance. Lady Frankenstein herself, Rosalba Neri, struts around the hospital grounds in a ridiculous/awesome disco-porn ensemble, looking for some sucker to bang. She's a voracious nymphomaniac, turns out.

As you might expect, it doesn't take her long to find a willing partner/victim. The gardener (cleverly shot to appear like a potential murder suspect) will do nicely.

Well, first she's redirected by one of the rat-faced doctors, who encourages her to cool off with a cold shower. Unfortunately for her, the shower turns into some kind of sexy nightmare.

Meanwhile, Mr. Kinski checks in with Cheryl Hume (adorable, doe-eyed Brit Margaret Lee), a depressed young lady on sick-leave from running her family's company, whatever it is. Her visiting hubby suggests she's cured, and encourages her to leave the hospital at once, so she can go back to work. Kinski thinks it's too soon, and sends Mr. Hume on his way.

Later that evening, yet another gorgeous patient, Mara (one-time actress Jane Garret) gets an inappropriate nude rubdown from two different nurses. So that was weird. Boner-popping, but weird.

Meanwhile, while everybody hangs out in the main hall guzzling wine and playing chess, Ann finally sneaks out, strips naked, and seduces the gardener in the greenhouse while, just outside, one of the nurses gets her head chopped off with a scythe. And then the gardener slaps her in the face a few times and tells her to split. Macho!

From there, Slaughter Hotel slips into familiar slasher-flick territory, with the masked-killer messily dispatching inmate and help alike while Dr. Clay spurns Cheryl's advances, Mara gets it on in the tub with her nurse, and Ann gets it on with herself, in a verging-on-X masturbation scene.

Unsatisfied with self-manipulation, she then attempts to seduce the killer - axe in hand - but that does not turn out well for her.

There's also a hilariously bizarre scene where Nurse Helen (Monica Strebel), after idly masturbating while Mara towels off, plays a little flute music on the stereo and informs her that it's from her "native country". This naturally causes her to dance, you know, like a native. And then the nurse joins in, and it turns into a psychedelic dance party. And then into turns into a tender lesbian love-making scene. And then it turns into bloody murder!

The killer's reveal is pretty goofy, but the apocalyptic orgy of violence that leads up to it is pretty amazing. Had it been shot with any sense of realism, it would have been one of the most harrowing murder scenes of the 70's; instead, it's a ramped-up cartoon cavalcade of ketchup-colored wholesale slaughter. You really have to see it to believe it. That goes for the whole movie, really.


While director Di Leo, who spent most of his career toiling in spaghetti westerns and police dramas, is rarely name-checked in Giallo retrospectives, Slaughter Hotel certainly fits into the genre: it's got blood, sex, a gloved killer, pop-art flourishes, psychedelic camera shots, and a cocktail-swilling soundtrack. It's also got legendary psychotic actor Klaus Kinski and the almost as-legendary and more frequently nude Italian horror-goddess Rosalba Neri, and the jaw-dropping climax is one of the most gleefully over-the-top set-pieces in the entire70's Italian sex-horror cycle. For all the reasons and many more - gratuitous nude go-go dancing! Gratuitous arrow-through-the-neck gag! Gratuitous masturbation and chain-smoking! Gratuitous Klaus Kinski staring straight into the camera for no reason! - Slaughter Hotel is a must-see for sleazebeasts and Giallo fans alike. For acid-eaters, chronic masturbators and violent maniacs, it may also be the ultimate party tape.

Note: there are many dreary, washed-out looking prints of Slaughter Hotel making the rounds, most of them under the alt-title "Asylum Erotica". Hold out for the superior Shriek Show edition.



- Ken McIntyre

Lucifera - The Demonlover (1972)

AKA L'amante del demonio
Directed by Paolo Lombardo
Starring Rosalba Neri, Ferdinando Poggi, Edmund Purdom
Rated R
Italy

"We heard this was the House of the Devil. Can we stay the night?"

Sometimes, with these old 70's Euro-sleaze mish-mashes, you get the feeling that the translator is just fucking with the guy who taps out the subtitles, that he's making the whole thing up as he goes along after gulping down a handful of Mescaline and washing it down with half a bottle of cherry Nyquil. That's got to be the case here. If it's not, than Paolo Lombardo is insane, because nothing about The Demon Lover makes a lick of sense.

It all starts out beautifully, though. A mini-skirted Rosalba Neri and two of her groovy-mod pals visit a creaky old mansion for kicks. They are greeted by a friendly young caretaker who attempts to give them a historical tour of the joint. They are quite uninterested in his jibber-jabber, however, and Neri bluntly tells him to knock it off. She just wants to know if the devil really lives there. That's the rumor about the place. The caretaker is non-committal about the house's current occupants, but invites them to stay for dinner anyway. They eat boiled eggs at a giant dining room table. There's a set place on the other end for the mysterious owner, just in case he shows up. He does not, unless he's already there. You know, if he's invisible.

The girls stay the night, and head off to their individual bedrooms. During the night, there is much crashing and bashing, as their often is in these sorta of situations. Neri wanders the hallways to investigate the noise, and sees a portrait of a girl engulfed in flames. The girl in said portrait looks exactly like her. "I burn," mutters Neri, clearly shaken by the image. "I burn. I burn!"

Our previously wisecracking young friend goes pale from panic and passes out. She wakes up to find herself in a pastoral 16th century German village. In this village, she is Helga, the most beautiful virgin in all the land, and she is engaged to Hans (Ferdando Poggi), a dashing young so-and-so with such charm, he can pluck birds from their nests and storke their tiny heads while they coo appreciably.

These scenes - flashbacks, perhaps, or some alternate reality, or maybe just vivid fever dreams - are shot in like some sort of bizarre fairy tale, with ridiculous costumes that aim for "Period piece", but land somewhere around "Early 70's high school production of Mother Goose". Initially, I assumed this sudden sideways detour to the Renaissance Faire would be over quickly, so we could get back to the haunted house and the go-go boots, but alas, we are stuck in this old-timey purgatory for 95% of the film. Bummer.

Anyway, whoever these villagers are, they've been slugging the Nyquil nearly as much as the film's translator, because nothing at all happens for long stretches, and the dead-eyed denizens of this gloomy glen simply mill around town, playing flutes, "checking barrels", and carrying baskets of food to market. Even a bizarre sword fight in a tavern ends in a shrug-worthy truce. The only thing that seems to perk folks up is the impending marriage of Helga and Hans. In one pivotal scene, Helga's mom finishes sewing her wedding dress and presents it to her, warning her that only Hans can see it before the wedding. If any other man should lay their peepers on it before then, Helga will be cursed. "It's like a form of the 'Evil eye'," she tells her. When Helga holds it up to her voluptuous body in front of an open window (to see her reflection, I'm assuming. Perhaps they owned no windows), a dude in a red hood suddenly pops up, spooking her and, naturally, damning her with the evil wedding dress curse.

Not wanting to start off her marriage on a bad note, Helga goes to visit the local witch - a young blonde wearing a putty nose - who tells her that to lift the curse, she'll have to show up at the top of a local hill that evening with two of her virginal pals, and then recite a bunch of gibberish. She does exactly that, but her two friends lose their way in the darkness (again, this is where I think things may have been lost in translation - it's bright daylight, but the girls complain about it being too dark to see where they're going) and they get absconded by the witch and her hooded minions. The whole ritual was just a ruse, turns out. The girls get dragged to some cave where they are forced to take part in a Satanic orgy led by a topless blonde lesbian witch/vampire. So that's pretty awesome.

Then the devil/Dracula (Edmund Perdom) shows up and sinks his fangs into Helga's pals, turning them into his slaves. Later on, they stumble into a confused Helga. They bite her in the boobs, and she spends the next day wandering around in a silent trance. Nobody really notices, though.

A with-it local girl, who also happens to be madly in love with Hans, tries to warn the other villagers that Helga is now a slave to Satan, but Helga chains her up and tears out her tongue first. It's a fruitless effort, since the villagers find her mid-murder, and sentence her to be burned alive. Helga throws herself upon the mercy of the local priest, but when she looks under his hood, she is horrified to find that...well, no spoilers, but if you've read seen any other horror movie in your entire life, than you can guess the ending. Both of them.

Despite a story that flirts with all manner of perversity and hints at unspeakable violence, nothing much happens in The Demon Lover.Witless and bloodless (but with a generous helping of nudity), this meandering snoozer would be a complete waste of time were it not for the breathless beauty of Rosalba Neri. Neri's doe eyes and exquisite curves are so captivating that it doesn't particularly matter what else is happening on screen. And that's good, because most of the time, nothing else is. Disciples of Rosalba, rejoice. Everybody else, hold out for more interesting Satanic orgies.

Clip: Assorted scenes from the film.

- Ken McIntyre