During
my limited exposure to the world of Paul
Naschy flicks (NIGHT
OF THE HOWLING BEAST, EXORCISM,
HORROR
RISES FROM THE TOMB and Fred Olen Ray's
THE UNLIVING) I've quickly learned to expect
the unexpected. The flicks all have a decidedly
off-kilter sensibility that makes them like
a carnival funhouse – you just never
know what's around the corner.
Take RUE MORGUE MASSACRES
for instance. After a credit sequence set
to a jaunty score that belies the horrors
to come, we arrive at the local tavern where
everything's big – the beers, the boobs
and the idiots. Udo, the most drunken idiot
of the bunch, decides to head home by himself,
a bad move in this med school town where
Gotho the hunchback (Naschy) is on the prowl.
Sure enough, Gotho pounces
on the drunken lout and the next thing you
know he's hacking the poor guy's appendages
off in the basement of the med school. Udo,
as it turns out, was the boyfriend of Ilsa
(Maria Elena Arpon), a terminally ill young
woman who grew up with Gotho and is one
of the few people to treat him with respect
and dignity. While others look down upon,
tease, throw rocks at and generally mistreat
the hunchback, Ilsa loves his visits. Which
means she's not long for this world.
When vicious, teasing med
students keep him from being at Ilsa's side
when she dies, Gotho goes ape and kills
another drunken med student and steals Ilsa's
body from the morgue. Escaping to his subterranean
lair decorated in early Spanish Inquisition,
Gotho wiles away the days waiting for Ilsa
to wake up. Oh yeah, and keeping the rats
off her. Poor, innocent Gotho. (In one of
the flick's most notorious sequences, Gotho
lights the rats on fire to keep them off
Ilsa's body. And thanks to the animal rights
standards at the time, well, let's just
say that these are not animatronic rodents.)
And that's just the first
twenty minutes. The flick gets super crazy
with the introduction of Dr. Orla (Alberto
Dalbes), a university professor researching
what every crazy scientist researches in
these flicks: How to create life from death.
With his university funding
axed, Dr. Orla pounces upon Gotho's love
for Ilsa and promises to "wake her
up" if the hunchback will let him move
his lab down into the caverns. Poor Gotho
just wants his Ilsa back, and if he has
to build a sulfuric acid pit with retractable
cover and wire an underground cave for electricity,
by golly, that's what he's gonna do.
Yes, Gotho is a multiple murderer
obsessed with a dead woman. Yes, he's got
a crazy ol' hump and a "gorilla's face."
But there's something quite lovable about
this deformed, love-sick, homicidal handyman.
At this point, RUE MORGUE
MASSACRES (also known by the better title
of HUNCHBACK OF THE MORGUE) detours into
more craziness than I can possibly describe.
Let's just say that Dr. Orla continues to
walk the fine line between brilliant and
insane, the Spanish Mariette Hartley (Rossana
Yanni) gets herself a little Hunchback Love
and there's a howling Synthesized Protoplasm
locked in a cavern cell. And I didn't even
mention the teenage lesbian S&M chicks
at the local women's reformatory!
With a story by its star,
RUE MORGUE is fun-filled Eurotrash with
off-the-wall plot twists, a nicely layered
performance by Naschy, and enough B-movie
grue and gratuitous violence to please gore
fans.
