Ten Days of Terror!: Bloody Moon

Film: Bloody Moon (Die Säge des Todes)
Format: Streaming video from Amazon Prime on Fire!

Oh, boy. This is going to be interesting because Bloody Moon (or Die Säge des Todes in German, which translates to “The Saw of Death”) is one of those movies that doesn’t make a great deal of sense. This is a movie made by a Spanish director with a German name and mainly German cast, and in the style of an Italian horror movie. That kind of confusion is going to be indicative of what is to come.

I mean that sincerely. This is a movie that exists so that director Jesús Franco could do things like stab a woman through the nipple, saw a woman’s head off, and have an actress simulate sex sounds. There isn’t a lot here that makes cohesive sense beyond a set of loosely-held plot points that sort of go in the same direction.

Ten Days of Terror!: The Diabolical Dr. Z

Film: The Diabolical Dr. Z (Miss Muerte)
Format: Streaming video from Plex on Fire!

I don’t typically watch a movie twice before writing a review, but I found that it was necessary for The Diabolical Dr. Z (or Miss Muerte if you prefer). There is a plot to this movie, but it goes in a lot of directions, and a lot of what is happening feels like it’s here specifically to get the running time to feature length. Co-screenwriter and director Jesús Franco has a story that he wants to tell here, but seems to have needed an editor to trim out some of the fat.

The truth is that The Diabolical Dr. Z should be called Dr. Z’s Diabolical Daughter. Our titular character, Doctor Zimmer (Antonio Jiménez Escribano) doesn’t make it all the way through the first act. We see him doing some experiments on an escaped felon. Eventually we come to learn that Zimmer’s experiments are in mind control, a process that appears to involve pushing large nails into people’s temples and spines. From here, Zimmer and his daughter Irma (Mabel Karr) arrive at a conference on neurology. Zimmer makes the claim that he can find the genetic roots of good and evil and that he should be permitted to experiment on human subjects (although he’s already been doing so). Rebuffed by a trio of doctors, Zimmer suffers an attack and dies.

Stop Me if You've Heard this One

Film: Count Dracula (Nachts, wenn Dracula erwacht)
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on various players.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula is one of the great books of the end of the 19th century. Seriously, if you haven’t read the book, seek it out, because it really is fantastic. It’s also a book that has been adapted as much or more than pretty much everything else out there aside from the Bible. The 1970 Count Dracula, also known by its German title of Nachts, wenn Dracula erwacht, which sounds badass in German (and means “Nights, when Dracula awakens”) is, I believe, the 8th adaptation of Dracula I have seen--Nosferatu and its remake from the ‘70s, the Bela Lugosi version and the Spanish language version of the same vintage, Christopher Lee’s first Hammer horror film, the Frank Langella version, and Coppola’s from the mid-‘90s. So yes, this is the eighth one. It’s like a Batman original story; it just keeps showing up.

Because of this, I’m not going to spend a great deal of time discussing the plot. If you really need my take on the narrative, well, there are literally seven other versions of this basic story that I have already written up. Go to one of those.