Alucarda (1978)
I must give props to a b-movie review site I’ve referenced in the past for making me hunt down this movie. I don’t really remember what 1000 Misspent Hours had to say about this film, as I must’ve read the review years ago. However, once I saw its alternate title “Innocents from Hell,” I knew this was an absolute NECESSITY for me to find and see. I mean, really. Can you afford NOT to know about a movie called “Innocents from Hell”? Damn right you can’t not know . . . or can you? Just read on, dammit.
Premise: 1.5/5
I don't know why the convent habits look like what you'd dress a mummy i, nor do I know why there's an army of crucified Jesi hanging from the ceiling, but I do know this: we're off to crazytown.
This movie has an interesting setup, but quickly goes completely over-the-top barmy–but then again, with a title like “Innocents from Hell” there’s no way I could expect anything different. It’s still a blast to watch, but the story never feels like much more than something they just put in to provide a framework for all the screaming, hysterics, and fire to follow. The parts I can explain, I’ll try to, so bear with me. The movie starts with somebody a bit too pretty to be giving birth to a demon baby giving birth to a (possibly demonic) baby named Alucarda in a definitively non-Christian crypt somewhere. Right off the bat you know that isn’t good, and it’s even less good when the new mom hands Alucarda off to a typically ugly crone that kind of looks like Monty Python era Terry Gilliam in drag, imploring this de facto midwife to take the baby to the convent, and to make sure “he” doesn’t ever get her. We don’t know who “he” is, and it’s never explained, but the baby daddy is probably either Satan or Dracula, and either way it sounds like he kills the mother in a decidedly unpleasant way as the camera goes black and we cut to 15 years later. We meet Justine as she’s being brought to this convent after her parents died in an accident, and in turn Justine gets to meet her new roommate Alucarda. They haven’t known each other more than 5 minutes before they promise to become, quite literally, BFFs (good thing Justine didn’t see Alucarda materialize out of the shadows right behind her, ‘cuz that could’ve been awkward). Now, I’m not trying to say that they straight up vamp on vamp right away, far from it. They’ve got some time to run around, frolic, and stumble on weird Torgoatborgnine peddlers and fortunetellers that look suspiciously like Cher before Alucarda starts getting REALLY weird. But once Alucarda and Justine stumble on that crypt from the opening scene, you can kiss your rational mind goodbye as the movie falls into one fucked up scene to the next with nary a break between ‘em.
Torgoatborgnine is here to say "I'm a goddamn PIMP y'all!"
After they have a sinisterly strange experience at the crypt with Alucarda suffering a rabid freakout, the next scene cuts to them in a mass and sermon that the words “fire and brimstone” don’t even begin to describe. Justine, for some reason, passes out during the heights of zealous rhetoric of the sermon, and is hurried off to her room to be watched over by the eager-to-volunteer Alucarda until she wakes. Justine wakes up alright, just in time for Alucarda to have another full-frontal attack of the crazy where she keeps screaming “Belphegor! Beelzebub! Astaroth!” and swears revenge for who knows what for like 5 minutes. Rather than shutting Justine down again, this sort of reinvigorates her. Then Torgoatborgnine materializes in their room and they become something significantly sexier than blood brothers, by which I mean they cut each others boobs with Torgoatborgnine’s help and lick the blood off the blade before making out. A thunderstorm happens as they do this, and the rain turns to blood, one of the sisters in the convent starts praying like crazy for Justine, and Justine and Alucarda end up at a big ol’ orgy where the ceremony leader ends up getting killed by something for some reason that I didn’t understand (unless it was supposed to be god doing a smackdown, since this scene is intercut with hysteric praying nun). Then it’s cut back to the convent, I don’t know if it’s a bible study class or another mass, but Alucarda and Justine are too busy whispering like, well, schoolgirls, during it to pay much attention. Naturally this doesn’t go over big with the Mother Superior. At that point they both get up and renounce God and praise Satan, which also doesn’t play well. For some reason, although it’s clear that Alucarda is the instigator, she only has to go to confession (where she calls the confessor a worshipper of death and a hypocrite, while reaching through the confessional window and pulling his hand into her booth and towards her crotch), while Justine is prepared for an exorcism. But before we get to the exorcism, we have a scene where the nuns get the crap whipped out of their backs while a shirtless priest stands in the middle of the room and recites a list of demonic possession cases “that have been confirmed!” I don’t get it either, and then the exorcism itself has Justine stripped naked on a crucifix and poked with needles while Alucarda is tied to a different crucifix and the worst she receives is a punch in the mouth to shut her up when she starts screaming “you’ll all die soon!” during the rite. For some reason, being poked with a needle a few times kills Justine, and a doctor comes in, spouts some rhetoric about how “this is the age of reason, what you’re doing is nothing but superstition!” and takes Alucarda home with him. For some reason, the convent just lets him do this, something they’ll have good cause to regret a few scenes later, after Justine is found nude in a coffin full of blood, wakes up, and helps herself to the neck of one nun after burning another one to death with hellfire. The supposedly rational doctor has become a full convert by now, and splashes Justine with holy water for like 5 minutes, eventually causing her and her nakedness to be reduced to a dry skeleton. Then Alucarda shows up back at the convent for some reason with the doctor’s daughter (she’s quick on the rebound, apparently!) and starts burning nuns to death with hellfire of her own. A lot of screaming and fire ensues, one of the dead nuns’ bodies is turned into a makeshift cross by the head priest (after Alucarda burns the convent crucifix statue) and then for some reason Alucarda spazzes for a couple minutes before becoming reduced to dust. Then the credits roll. Congratulations, you’ve just watched “Alucarda”!
Cast: 2/5
Satan LOVES to watch.
How highly you rate the cast is directly proportionate to how much you enjoy screaming. There’s a TON of it in the movie, in whole segments there’s no dialogue but screaming and shrieking. So, I hope you enjoy that–but I wouldn’t recommend listening to this movie with earphones. As far as actual acting goes, I can only say that there were a couple people who were sorta decent: Tina Romero who played Alucarda and Tina French who played Sister Angelica. Why either one of them is so keen on bland and irritating Justine, played by Susana Kamini, is beyond me. Everyone else in the movie is a bad character actor gone mad with their own dubious skills. Practically every line is spoken WITH DIRE PORTENT or terrified scarediness! from most everyone in the movie (other than Tina Romero, who’s just such a damned weirdo as Alucarda anyway), at some points the cast makes even the most melodramatic soap opera seem restrained in comparison.
Technical: 3/5
Insert your own joke about "playing doctor" here.
This is a good-looking movie, albeit weirdly so–the crypt from the opening scene is really detailed and cool, surprisingly “pretty” for a morbid death factory that it serves as the catalyst for. By contrast, the convent is also really cool, although for some reason it looks more like a creepy cave than a church, and MAN do they have a lot of crucified Jesus figures hanging on the wall of the main room. I assume that this may tie in to the characterization of the possessed and evil people in the movie of “the Church” as a death-loving nasty institution of its own, in contrast to the strange beauty of the vibrant (but chilling) “Satanic” crypt Alucarda was born in and the nature scenes where Alucard and Justine frolic or have orgies. If that’s an attempt at paradigm-shifting the movie is making, they also shoot that possibility in the foot later when they, well, start burning people alive and the rational doctor converts to a true believer so he can battle the evil of Alucarda. Of course, this is a movie about sex, death, and violence, so maybe I’m searching for deeper stuff that just isn’t there. At any rate, the movie’s beautifully shot and imagined, and I especially like the attention that was paid to utilizing sound (I mean, other than the aforementioned screaming) to its fullest extent. The sound is almost as effective, and in some places even MORE effective than the gore scenes for trying to make the scenes scarier or more visceral. And boy do they work their pyro good in this movie, and the scenes where you can see Alucarda focusing in on hellfiring another unfortunate nun has a distinctive and cool look. Almost like an artistic Carrie White.
Popcorn Factor: 5/5
Note to the convent clothing supplier: less flammable robes plz, k thks!
I don’t know what it is about this movie. I can’t say it’s good, the acting is generally pretty miserable and the plot’s incoherent in a lot of places, but it’s just fun. Maybe it just hits my base entertainment needs so dead-on, but it kept me entertained the whole time. The movie also doesn’t fuck around with your time, it drops you right into the movie just a little bit before all the crazy starts coming out to play, long enough to get your bearings and then “hey, lesbian BFFs and gypsies, plus crazy Christian freaks and fire? YES!” I didn’t even mind that there were so many scenes of extensive spazzing and shrieking, even those were somehow fun to watch for the sheer insanity of it. If you want to see this movie, DO NOT go looking for something “good.” This is pretty sleazy stuff and definitely not for everyone, but what a hell of a good time you’ll have if you just turn your brain off!