H!TITDS - Devil's Kiss (1976)
Let us now put our hands on the table and join them together, forming an endless chain that must not be broken under any circumstance.
In the great beyond, the souls of those who left us are floating.
Let us enter into the world of the shadows and the spirits.
Whoever wants to communicate, with the departed one, let him speak up and make it.
Hello, and welcome to Hello, This is the Doom Show.
I am Richard.
Folks, we are back in the Fun Studio.
It's got all kinds of cool rugs, and it's got lots of denim on the walls, because that's what you should soundproof with, because it's biodegradable.
I'm on a tangent, and we already started.
Talking to Mark.
Hello, Mark.
How are you doing, Richard?
I am doing great.
How about you?
I am good, and I'm admiring, like, how you have acid-washed denim, and then, like, the deep-dyed denim, and you've got quite the denim collection on the walls.
I spent a little extra, so it would be all Jordache and Bugle Boy jeans.
Now, let me just pull out my bedazzler here, and I'll make it more homey.
Don't put too much bedazzling, because then it won't be soundproof anymore.
It'll be very equity with all that metal.
Folks, we're here talking about Devil's Kiss, 1976, aka La Perversa, Carcia, oh, maybe I'm messing this up already, Caricia, maybe, that might be the pronunciation, de Satan from, I believe this is a French and Spanish co-production.
It feels...
It feels as such, doesn't it?
Yeah, it's a good blending of both.
I was going to say, this feels French.
And then I'm like, no, it also feels Spanish as hell.
So this was directed by Jordy Guigo, or Guijo, he's going by Georges Guijo, or Guigo for this one.
And the most information I could find about this movie is on the back of the freaking Blu-ray, where Tim Lucas says, Devil's Kiss was the first and only horror film directed by Georges Guigo, the French pseudonym of Spanish born Jorge Luis Guigo Aznar.
And he has a cameo in the film, and then he talks about the quality of the film.
So there's no extras on the disc, sadly.
Yeah, nothing.
Not even trailers.
Nothing.
Well, that's the thing.
I cannot find a trailer for this movie.
I can also, I wanted to do something special tonight.
I wanted to find the Spanish VHS tape, not to buy it.
I'm not going crazy.
I wanted to find just someone who had scanned the back and then I was going to use Google Translate to translate the Spanish directly into English and then see what madness came up.
But no, I couldn't find a picture clear enough to even run the text recognition on it.
So I didn't get to do that.
Oh, sadness.
And there's no trailer, but the plot for this is straight off of IMDB because I'm not reading the two paragraphs on the Blu-ray.
Former Countess Clare and Professor Gruber conduct occult research in Castle basement of Count Victor, reanimating people to kill for them.
So probably a user wrote that, left out a couple of words there.
It's fine.
We're going to spoil this thing.
We're not going to do the whole scene by scene.
Mark and I were talking before we started recording about how insane that would have been, because even trying to economically write down things, I still took almost two and a half pages of notes.
So we're going to cover the key points of the plot, but you should absolutely check out this thing.
About the quality of the film, I don't have to spoil this.
Get the cheapest copy you could find.
You know, you might love this.
You might be angry that you check this out because of our discussion today.
But I leave it up to you.
I will hold how I feel about this movie till the end, as we usually do.
And now I can't speak for Richard, but like I myself would actually enjoy coming to your home and watching it with you just to see what you think about it.
Oh, man.
I would love that.
I would say this would be a party movie for The Enlightened.
No, maybe the Unenlightened would be better off.
Anyway, so the only thing I found about Jordy Guijo, he did direct something that's called El Spectro, oh, excuse me, El Espectro de Justine in 1986, which is, IMDB claims is a horror movie, but I can find absolutely nothing about it.
Oh, interesting.
Okay.
Well, there you go.
Who knows?
The other thing about this guy is that he wrote Exorcism, the Paul Nashie exorcist ripoff.
So someone actually wrote that thing, which I like that and filmed quite a bit, though, you know, it's got some issues.
All exorcist ripoffs have some issue.
So starring in this movie, we got Claire Grandier, our villainess, although, hey, the cards were stacked against her.
I don't blame her at all.
She's played by Sylvia Solar from Killer War Gloves and frickin eyeball.
Eyeball.
Oh, man.
Next up is Olivier Mathot.
I don't know, French is happening.
Huge Jess Franco guy.
This guy was in so many Franco movies, I didn't even write any of them.
Oh, he plays Professor Gruber, who for some reason, when we first see him, has literally got green makeup on.
And he never looks like that again.
Never, ever.
There must have been a bad day on the set for him.
It's so insane.
We have José Nieto, the Duke de Haussamont.
This is the patron of our mad scientist here.
José Nieto was in Frankenstein's Bloody Terror, which I've been overdue for a rewatch for a long time.
Next up, we've got our sexy maid Loretta, who's played by Evelyn Scott.
She was in Night of the Skull.
Just Frank goes all over this thing.
She's particularly hilarious in this movie.
She seems like she'd be a character that would just disappear, but she never goes anywhere.
It's great.
Next up is Daniel Martin, Richard de Haussamont.
He's the nephew, I believe, of the Duke.
His name is Richard, which of course I love people named Richard.
Later, he becomes the Duke.
So he's Duke Dick or Dick Duke.
But this play by Daniel Martin, and he was in Demon Witch Child, which...
I love Demon Witch Child so much.
Yeah, that's our list.
We're doing that eventually.
And then we got Susan, who is his girlfriend, who's a model, who has the scene-stealing model montage we'll talk about.
She was in two Nashi movies, Curse of the Devil and The Mummy's Revenge.
Finally, we got just a couple of notable people.
Victor Israel is in this.
Briefly, as a baron, I was hoping he'd be a main character.
I don't know if he has a glass eye or a lazy eye, I'm not sure, but Victor Israel is all over Spanish horror and occasionally pops up in those Spanish-Italian co-productions.
I love him.
And then we have José Lefante.
Folks may remember his deep-set eyes with big black circles around them from Let Sleeping Corpses Lie, aka Murder at Manchester Morgue, Breakfast at Manchester Morgue, and Zombie 3.
That movie had so many titles.
It was great.
He plays a servant who's a little handsy with the models in the house.
Yes, he does.
Now, just real quick, I don't want to derail this, but now I also noticed that Oliver Mithat and then Evelyn Scott and Sylvia Solar all starred in House of Cruel Dolls, if you ever saw that.
They were all in that as well.
Dolls?
Yeah, it's basically like a white slavery thing, and they force the woman they kidnapped into sex work.
But they were all in that too.
I just found that very interesting.
And then you were talking about the Jez Franco thing.
I don't know if you watch a lot of weird Jez Franco stuff.
But Evelyn Scott and Oliver were both in the Shining Sex film as well.
Yes, I reviewed that.
And that was beyond my porn capability.
The deleted scenes were like, oh, there's extended scenes.
I go to them like, oh.
The key word there was extended.
No, I have not heard of House of Cruel Dolls, although I see Jez Franco co-wrote it.
Yeah, like you were saying, like a lot of Jez Franco overlap, and then a lot of them worked with Nashi in some degree.
I definitely did a deep dive into good old Jez Franco.
Boy, oh boy.
Instead of a trailer, I'm just going to play a little bit of the music from this because this has got some nice cuts to it.
This movie's got some nice needle drops in it that I wonder how much composing was done or this guy who they credit as the composer was one of those house composers for a movie studio.
This was all like library music for other things.
But I just watched Curse of the Screaming Dead not too long ago.
And the funny thing about that movie is I was listening to it.
I'm like, man, they really dug deep for this library music.
Then I realized there was a recurring motif in the music.
I'm like, holy shit.
Someone composed this for the movie.
And sure enough, it had its own composer.
They spent money and they made a whole soundtrack.
But what they ended up with was music that sounded like library music from a 60s film.
In the 80s, it was so weird.
He's like, look what I can do.
Oh, man, Curse of the Screaming Dead, folks.
That is one of the most brutal, boring things I've ever sat through.
That hurt my feelings.
I mean, hey, I'm not a filmmaker.
I've made really bad short movies.
I've never even attempted a feature length movie.
But one of the reasons is I don't have enough ideas to fill a feature length movie.
That's never stopped some people, Richard.
No, clearly not.
It's called Curse of the Screaming Dead.
So anyway, I'm going to jump into this plot here, or what could be called a plot.
If you just went by the dialogue of this movie, you wouldn't know what the story was.
You'd never know.
The film opens up at an amazing castle, inside of which there is a group of people watching a sick opening dance number.
Mark, what is this dance number all about?
What's happening here?
Okay, so in my mind, this would be like the perfect birthday party.
If I had this as a 12-year-old, I'd be in heaven.
So basically, you've got this scantily clad woman, who I think it's Betty, if I'm not mistaken, one of the models, I think.
The scantily clad male dancing with her, he's more dressed than her, but it's really bizarre.
He has a headdress and arm, not feathers.
It almost looks like straw.
Yeah, like straw.
And then I love that people are just well dressed, standing around watching this transpire.
I told Walt, my husband, I'm like, is this a timeshare thing?
You have to sit through this before you can get your free buffet meal.
But it's wonderful.
Every party should start like this, in my mind.
This is cultural appropriation, but we don't know what culture...
No, we have no clue what culture this would really be.
None whatsoever.
I'm not sure who's supposed to be offended.
No.
It's wonderful in so many ways.
It's just great.
After this dance number, that's when we get the meat and potatoes of this movie, which is a fashion show.
Holy cow!
And according to what I was reading off the back of the box, is that the fashion show announcer is wearing this skin-tight bodysuit.
Yeah, nipple zippers.
That's the director.
I was going to ask you that.
So he's not a bad-looking gentleman.
He looks good in a nipple zipper jumpsuit.
He's very confident.
But his outfit is just the beginning.
Mark, tell us about this fashion show, because I know you were excited to talk about it.
Imagine being at this party where you've just witnessed a dance number and you thought there's no way you can top this, but it can be topped by a bevy of models coming out in these jumpsuits.
And I don't know how they're walking in some of these shoes because they put Kiss to shame.
To me, it looks like someone's almost forcing them.
There's a cannon shooting them onto the floor, because they're propelled out there, and they're working it around.
It's amazing.
I would be into a frenzy.
I would be speaking in tongues.
It would be so exciting for me.
I can't even imagine, Richard, what this would be like.
I can't.
I just...
Oh, my gosh, Richard.
It's unbelievable.
I will say this, though.
As you watch it, I feel like they led with some of the better jumpsuits, and some of the weaker ones followed up.
I would have started with some of the other ones, but either way, it's just...
It's a feast for the senses.
It really is.
Especially on Blu-ray, there's an outfit that I think the Blu-ray format was invented for.
I can't remember the colors, but I want to say it was like a flash of...
like flashes of pink and orange and red, like a collage of those colors, but then a stark black or stark brown section to the jumpsuit that gave it this weird uniform look to it, but it was skin tight.
These fashions are completely insane.
And some of them are so wildly unflattering.
Oh, yes.
For girls, like a couple of them are...
you know, there's one girl especially.
I'm not sure which model it is.
She's like the first one we see naked, and she just zips up into her suit.
I'm like, wow.
They tailored this for this woman.
Because she's naked.
I'm like, there's a naked woman.
And then she puts on the suit, and I'm like, whoa, that's a really hot woman in a jumpsuit.
You know, like, I'm really, you know, like, like, it's like when you watch a lot of Jess Franco and you see Lena Romain naked in, like, 30 movies.
But then when you see her in, what's that one, Macumba Sexual, where she's just walking around in a tank top in Daisy Dukes, and it's the hottest thing I've ever seen, I'm so desensitized to Lena Romain naked.
You're right.
She's got to put on clothes to get a reaction.
I've heard that in that review.
I can't remember.
It's a long time ago.
Yeah.
The thing about this fashion show that I really love is the sick bass line.
This music had me doing fricking turns on the catwalk.
Man, some of the music in this is just wonderful.
Oh, it's incredible.
So this segues very awkwardly.
So, so far, we've had a floor show, and we've had a fashion show.
And in between all this, we've been introduced to Claire and Dr.
Gruber and, you know, Mr.
Duke of Day House Mall.
This is his house.
This is the chateau.
I'm going to make this as short as possible, because this is the one thing I love, is how convoluted and complicated all of this is.
Claire's husband was a landowner of some kind, and then some bad deals went down with the House of Mont, and he ended up killing himself.
And now she's here bent on revenge, and the Duke doesn't realize that he's the target?
Yeah, he's not the rise bulb in the box.
He's one of the targets.
Yeah.
She's literally talking about how upset she is, but here's the thing about Claire.
She's verbose, like extremely verbose.
There are sentences in this movie, Mark, where the dubbers are so confused, the script for the dubbing of this movie must have been wild.
I wrote in my notes that the dubbers are getting confused mid-sentence.
Her and Dr.
Gruber will omit some sentences that are just run-on things that sound worse than what I'm doing right now.
