Ten Days of Terror!: Alucarda

Film: Alucarda
Format: Streaming video from Mometu on Fire!

When you watch movies from a list, as I have now done since the start of 2010, you often have to look in a lot of places to find them. I use more than a dozen streaming services (many of which are free—I’m not made of money) as well as four local libraries and the Illinois Prairie Cat library system to track things down, plus a variety of websites like YouTube and DailyMotion for a few rarities. So, when the only way to watch a movie is yet another streaming site, I’m going to give it a shot. And so I watched Alucarda on Mometu, which has just started showing up as an option for streaming.

This is also a case where I’m once again watching a movie that I have more or less seen before, since it is the sixth cinematic interpretation of this story that I have seen. Alucarda is yet again a version of the novella Carmilla, and I see that I’ve got a couple more versions of it to come. Seriously, there’s a lot of repetition in vampire movies.

We’re going to start with the birth of our title character. Lucy Westenra (Tina Romero) gives birth to her daughter Alucarda in a ruined palace. She gives the child to a Romani man (Claudio Brook), instructing him to take the child to the nearby convent, fearing that the devil himself will come for her daughter, and Lucy dies as the man runs off with her child.

We jump 15 years into the future and a young woman named Justine (Susana Kamini) comes to the convent and Alucarda (Tina Romero again) is immediately obsessed with her. After a quick tumble down a hill and a walk to the crypt where Alucarda was born, she professes her undying love for Justine and demands that the two of them make a pact that they will die together, and in so doing accidentally open up the grave of her mother.

And now things are going to get weird, and by weird I mean we’re going to get a lot of Satanic imagery, rituals, blood, and substantial nudity. It’s worth noting here that in-movie, these girls are supposed to be like 15-years-old, but there’s no reason for that to be actually true, since we’re not really given a sense of the passage of time. I don’t know how old Susana Kamini was at the time of filming, but Tina Romera was close to 30, and both of them are very obviously in their 20s. I say this because both of them—particularly Kamini—will be clothing-optional for much of the rest of the film.

Anyway, at the convent Alucarda starts invoking the names of various demons which causes the man who brought her to the convent to appear, perform a weird blood magic ritual with them, and then have them participate in an orgy in the woods. So, there’s a lot of nudity here, and it's late-‘70s nudity, so all of the women are sporting the full tribble in the nude scenes. It's also worth noting that the film is essentially equating Romani people with being Satanic, since those are the other participants in the orgy in the woods.

So now all hell is going to break loose at the convent, with the two girls proclaiming their love of Satan. All of the members of the convent are going to flagellate themselves as penance for not keeping the girls safe, which is ultimately going to lead to an exorcism of Justine. This exorcism involves her being lightly poked with a small knife a couple of times, which leads to her evidently bleeding to death from a couple of blood trickles. This causes Alucarda to be removed by Dr. Oszek (Claudio Brook again), who looks disturbingly like Stewart Copeland.

Anyway, eventually there are going to be vampires here and Alucarda is going to spend part of the wind-down of the film igniting nuns and monks on fire by shouting the names of demons at them. More nudity abounds until the whole thing comes crashing down.

While Alucarda is yet another version of Carmilla, it feels in large part like a response to Ken Russell’s The Devils. If I hadn’t known it was a version of Carmilla, I would hae guessed that it was a sort of pseudo-remake of Russell’s film.

Is it good? Kind of. It’s a fascinating watch if only because of how completely off the rails it is and because of just how happy it is to buy into that complete nuttiness, but it’s not a film I feel the need to watch a second time.

Why to watch Twisted Nerve: This is upsetting in the way that any film involving deep mental illness is upsetting.
Why not to watch: It’s long for the story it wants to tell.