Session: It's Not Just One of Those -- Very Unusual Vampires, Week 4
Movie: Night of the Devils (1972)
Directed by Giorgio Ferroni
As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL.
Plot:
Stuck in the woods after he crashes his car, Nicola finds himself sheltering with a family that is Deathly afraid of a vampire who prowls the forest by night. Hilarity ensues.
Reaction:
Night starts off surrealistically, with odd imagery of a maggot-infested skull, an exploding head, a naked woman, and various other disconnected images. We see Nicola, suffering from amnesia, in a mental hospital, before the main plot is shown in flashback. It's an interesting start.
There are some times that the movie gets a bit slow, though even then there's a constant sense of dread that kept me on the edge of my seat. Nicola is puzzled by and annoyed at his hosts and their seeming-irrational actions, and that conflict helps. Of course, we in the class were vocally urging him to just get himself TF out of there. But the last twenty minutes or so were a real thrill ride, as Nicola leaves, then returns for Sdenka, thinks better of it and then has to fight off the whole vampire family.
There is one major plothole that bugs me. After Nicola drove off in his panic, leaving a non-vampirized Sdenka in the forest surrounded by her vampirized family, how did she manage to escape?
The ending had me puzzled. I had figured out that Sdenka wasn't a vampire. By this point, it had become clear that vampires have red rings under their eyes. Sdenka didn't. When she was chasing after Nicola in the basement of his insane asylum, with Nicola believing she was a vampire, I knew that he would kill her and then find out the truth. And I got that part right. But why did the camera show the fires in the furnace so prominently? I was certain that they would play a role in the ending. There really was no other reason for them to be there. Maybe Nicola, heartbroken by his mistake, would hurl himself into the flames. But those flames played no role -- a fact that seems even stranger given that the final shot was a loving closeup of the flames. I am convinced that there was a rewrite. Keith says he has never read of any such change. But I'm sure that there was.
Ratings
Me: 9
Bob: 9
Christina: 9.2
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