I think my desire to live in an
actual, honest-to-God, medieval castle lasted about as long as my desire to be
a professional skydiver. Just so the
suspense doesn’t kill you, the time lapse on that would number in the
negatives. I might reconsider if it were
Castle Greyskull, but even then, the drawbacks (aren’t you glad I didn’t do a
drawbridge pun?) would outweigh hanging with the Sorceress (maybe). First of all, there’s no insulation. I can’t imagine how cold they must get in
winter. Sure, there are all kinds of
fireplaces all over the place, and they do throw a nice amount of heat when in
use, but that’s problem number two: keeping the fireplaces lit. My memory is fair to middling (yes, they’re
basically the same level), but I wouldn’t remember what I had for breakfast if
it weren’t the same thing every day (see previous reviews in regards to me
being a creature of habit), so I’d be a popsicle in a couple days, tops. Problem number three is slightly related to
number two. Fireplaces tend to get
dirty, and the only thing more of a pain in the ass than keeping my current
house clean (which I’m moderately good at) would be a house that could fit
several of my houses inside. And it’s
made of stone. Have you ever washed
stone? It’s like washing dirt. No matter how much you scrub, it’s still
dirty. Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating a
little, but you’ll still never see me living in a castle (not that there’s any
real threat of that actually happening anyway).
Duke de Haussemont (José Nieto) throws
a soiree in the basement/dungeon of his chateau (French for “castle”), complete
with scads of Eurotrash present and an authentic “native” dance number. Claire Grandier (Silvia Solar), a
former member of the aristocracy now in disgrace and in attendance to perform
as a spiritual medium, shows up with her pal Dr. Gruber (Olivier Mathot),
who (in a totally not random bit of convenience plotting) is not only a
telepath but also a researcher in the area of the regeneration of human
tissue. The Duke decides that, what the
hell, he’ll let Claire and Gruber stay at his manse and conduct their
experiments in exchange for instructing him in the ways of the paranormal. So, naturally there’s more going on than
meets the eye. Or is there?
Jordí Gigó’s Devil’s Kiss (aka The
Wicked Caresses Of Satan) will never be considered a great film, even by
genre standards. Like so many films of
this time (and an inordinate amount of Spanish films in that number, to boot),
the plotting feels like it was done on a Colorforms playset. For those who don’t know (and, man, you
missed out, in that case), Colorforms were playsets, each of which had a set
theme. For our example here, let’s say
the theme is Batman. Now, by “playset”
what is actually meant is a glossy piece of cardboard with a fairly crude city
background drawn on it, and it’s about the size of a board game box. Included with your playset is a set of
figures, which are basically crude drawings of a couple of characters on
cut-out pieces of colored vinyl (think of those decorative snowflakes some
folks put on their windows in Winter).
Each character typically has a couple of arm pieces in different
positions that can be put on and peeled off, so that as you stare at the
totally rad tableau you’ve created, one or more vinyl pieces will invariably
fall off and just ruin everything. And
that’s how films like this one are put together. It consists of seemingly disparate bits and
pieces, thrown around to look neat for a couple of seconds, and if one or two
pieces happen to fall off and/or get lost, it doesn’t really matter, because
none of it made any sense from the moment you opened the damn box. Does that make sense? Don’t misunderstand. This doesn’t make the film unenjoyable; it
just makes it a little incomprehensible, if not in clarity then certainly in
logic.
It’s this Colorforms logic, this
apparently haphazard mélange of elements that gives the film a surrealistic,
dreamlike quality. For all intents and
purposes, Devil’s Kiss could be
described as a Mood Gothic. The wilder
and more lascivious aspects are enough to keep a viewer watching in that same
tilt-the-head fashion as Nipper, the RCA Victor trademark dog, but it’s the
texture of the piece that carries it along and makes this and films like this
the bizarro journeys that they are. I’ll
give you a couple of “for instances.”
While out horse riding, Claire comes across a mute dwarf (billed simply as
“Dwarf” in the credits and played by Ronnie Harp) who is by all appearances
wanted for attacking a young woman. She
takes him into her room and disrobes in front of him. Do they have sex? It’s implied, but we never find out. We’re too busy cutting to the next
scene. The techno jargon that flies
around this film is total gibberish and will have you squinting at the screen
in a vain attempt to figure out any of it.
The police who show up in the film serve absolutely no purpose other
than to give us scenery outside the chateau.
Gruber’s methods can kickstart dead tissue, but Claire needs to perform
a satanic ritual in order to imbue the body with an evil spirit and animate
it. These zombies are controlled by
Gruber via a combination of narcotics and mental telepathy. And did I mention that Gruber has a heart
condition? By all accounts, there’s no
reason any of this should work, and it mostly doesn’t, to be fair. But as I said, it’s not meant to make sense
in any traditional manner. It’s meant to
evoke dreams (or in this case, nightmares), and to that end it does pull it off
to some small degree.
Outside the film’s more outré
elements, there is an interesting theme of class warfare at play as well. Claire was once down with the hoi polloi, but
she lost everything, including her husband, at the hands of others in the same
class. She comes back to take revenge on
the upper class, but she also aligns herself with those of the lower class like
Dwarf. That she doesn’t do so publicly
is telling. On the one hand, she saves
Dwarf from certain death and gives his life purpose (kind of). On the other hand, this relationship must be
kept a secret for criminal reasons, but Claire still uses the man for cheap
labor. The upper class is the enemy, yet
Claire both is and isn’t in the lower class now. Nevertheless, she maintains the air of
superiority of her former station in life, and it lends a hint of disingenuousness
and hypocrisy to her schemes and a slight bit of nuance to a film that,
perhaps, shouldn’t really have any to begin with.
MVT: I love that Spanish
Gothic atmosphere Devil’s Kiss and
others of its ilk have. Like the better
Paul Naschy films, it feels both classic and modern while also never feeling
overly forced. In a way, it’s
transportive, and that’s a quality I long for in more movies.
Make Or Break: The Make is
the scene when Claire and Gruber bring their zombie (Moisés Augusto Rocha)
back from the dead. It contains the old
and new school atmospherics I mentioned before, evincing both classics like Frankenstein and then-recent Occult
works like Rosemary’s Baby and so
on. Plus, the zombie’s makeup is
gruesome as well as theatrical, (un)living in two worlds like so much of the
rest of the film.
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