Well, Halloween’s almost here, and I’m currently racing towards the finish line for a Halloween show for the Cabaret I work with (more on that next week, once I’ve got some good pictures). Hopefully, we’ll manage to perform on Saturday before all the theatres get shut down again as the current Covid situation in my country is…not great. But I wanted to at least share some thoughts with all of you (if there’s anybody out there…) on a few recent first time watches. Yup, more blurbs.
The Night Evelyn Came out of the Grave (1971)
This did not disappoint. Stylish, weird, psycho-sexual, outlandishly plotted and a bit too evenly paced, this holds up as one of the more enjoyable gialli I’ve seen so far (though I’m no expert in that department).
Alan is some kind of aristocrat who, having discovered that his beautiful red-haired bride had been cheating on him, seems to have killed her and now deals with his ongoing grief by luring ginger sex workers back to his decrepit castle/swinging mod styled pad where he tortures and murders them. One woman, Susan, we see undergo this ordeal and then escape into the night.
It seems that Alan’s therapeutic pastime is an open secret among his friends and employees, many of whom are concerned for him and the fact that he hasn’t been able to move on following the mysterious death of his wife. One of these, his uncle George, insists that he find a new wife and make a fresh start. So he does, marrying a blonde woman he meets at a party, Gladys. Then the spooky stuff starts and it seems that Gladys is being haunted by the dead wife, Evelyn. Actually, it’s been a series of double crossing plots by various combinations of George, Gladys, Susan, and Alan. In the end, all but Alan have been betrayed and murdered and he goes free.
The plot was actually surprising and fun. The film looked and sounded cool. And there was even a successfully chilling horror element in the way that power and wealth cause the world to turn a blind eye to this monster. I mean, the upper crust really doesn’t care how many prostitutes he kidnaps, tortures, and murders. They just want him to be happy and get over the death of his wife. I don’t know how intentional the social critique is, but it plays.