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Released by: Vinegar Syndrome
Released on: January 28th, 2025.
Director: Carlos Aured, León Klimovsky, Amando de Ossorio
Cast: Paul Naschy, María Silva, Jack Taylor, Helga Liné, Daniel Martín, Fernando Sancho
Year: 1973/1975/1975
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Curse of the Devil / The Vampires Night Orgy / Demon Witch Child – Movie Review:
Vinegar Syndrome offers up a triple dose of vintage Spanish horror with this three-disc Blu-ray special edition collection.
Curse Of The Devil:
Previously released by Anchor Bay Entertainment (along with Werewolf’s Shadow) and then by BCI Eclipse, Curse Of The Devil is back and this time restored in high definition! This popular Paul Naschy film starts off with a bang as a knight named Irineus Daninsky (Naschy) boldly removes the head of Count Bathory with a stroke of his sword. The counts wife, Countess Bathory (Maria Silva) and the rest of the deceased sorcerer’s followers are thusly burned at the stake for their crimes against God and man but before the flames take her, Countess Bathory manages to put a curse on Daninsky’s family.
Hundreds of years since that dramatic opening event, we meet Waldemar Daninsky (Naschy) while he’s out hunting a wolf. Completely by mistake, his bullet hits a gypsy who is none too pleased by this turn of events. He and his gypsy pals summon a demon to use a female named Ilona (Ines Morales) as a host. She, in turn, goes about trying to seduce Daninsky so that she can turn him into a werewolf. Ilona is successful in her quest but soon falls victim to a random escaped convict who brutally murders her. While all of this is going on, Daninskey has fallen head over heels for a pretty young woman (Fabiola Falcon). Unfortunately, he decides to sleep with her younger sister who he murders after transforming into a werewolf. The locals figure that the murders are the result of the escaped killer roaming the area until his corpse is found, at which point the angry mob begins to suspect that a werewolf might be in the area and organize to take up arms against such a threat.
Carlos Aured delivers plenty of sex, blood and monsters at a nice quick pace. He loads the film with enough atmosphere that overlooking the hokey plot is never a problem. The film looks fantastic from start to finish and at times is quite reminiscent of Jean Rollin’s more ethereal efforts. Naschy is his usual charismatic self playing the role of the tortured and conflicted Daninsky with plenty of flare. He makes for a likeable enough anti-hero here and his natural screen presence helps to make the film more than just a simple exploitative horror picture.
As far as how the werewolf scenes compare here, they’re different than the werewolf pictures Naschy had made prior, but no less effective. Rather than wear a mask, he’s instead been given a hefty make up job and that extra attention to detail really shows in the finished film. The fully transformed monster may not appear as frighteningly intense as he probably first appeared in 1973 but he’s still a creepy bastard and Naschy really puts himself into the role and pulls it off nicely.
The Vampire’s Night Orgy:
The late Leon Klimovsky, director of such 'classics' as the Paul Naschy vehicle Werewolf Shadow and Dr. Jekyll Vs. The Werewolf pumped out this tale of the undead back in 1972 during his most prolific period.
The story revolves around a busload of people who are heading off to a remote village to work in various positions. Their bus breaks down when their driver drops dead at the wheel, and they're forced to stop for the night at a small town they find along the way. When they arrive, the village is empty, though obviously inhabited. They put themselves up at the local inn and, that morning, they meet a few of the townspeople.
When they try and start the bus in the morning, it turns out that it won't start, so at the insistence of 'the countess' they stay another night, hoping to enjoy the hospitality of the townspeople, but instead, they find out the hard way about the secret that the town holds, and one by one, many of them start to go missing.
And what exactly could that ghastly secret be, I hear you ask aloud? Well, we don't want to spoil it for you, but read the title of the movie and it kind of gives itself away. That doesn't stop the movie from being enjoyable though. Sure, we've seen a lot of this before and since this movie was made (at times the film reminded me of Jean Rollin's 1978 film, The Grapes Of Death), especially those of us who groove on 70s Euro-Vampire films. But Klimovsky still pulls it off with no small amount of flair. The remote village location where so much of the movie takes place proves to be the perfect staging ground for a horror film like this. The locations for the movie always looks nice, and the women look even nicer. There are plenty of slick shot setups and nice camera moves keep the movie looking good, even if we ultimately know where it's going to end up as we get closer to the end.
On top of that, you get Jack Taylor in the lead, doing a really good job and bringing his inimitable screen presence to the film. Helga Liné pops up here in a supporting role as well, which is never a bad thing. This one won’t change your life, but it’s well-made, very atmospheric and plenty entertaining.
Demon Witch Child:
Last but not least, Amando de Ossorio’s Demon Witch Child, made in 1975 and also known as The Possessed, sees an old witch referred to as Mother Gautère (Tota Alba) run rampant in a church where she winds up snatching an infant girl. She is arrested by the authorities, with Commissioner Mr. Barnes (Ángel del Pozo) in particular taking great offense to her crimes, but before she can be punished, she jumps out a window and leaps to her death.
The coven that the old witch belonged to is led by a strange gypsy woman (Kali Hansa) who decides to avenge Gautère's death by giving an evil talisman to Barnes' daughter Susan (Marián Salgado, who dubbed Linda Blair in the Spanish version of The Exorcist!). This talisman allows Susan to become possessed by the witch, and soon enough, Susan is levitating in the air, just like in a certain William Friedkin film, a movie that this one borrows very heavily from in a lot of ways.
Before long, Susan is cursing up a storm and freaking everyone around her out. Her governess, Anne (Lone Fleming), tries to help but it isn't any good, particularly when Susan somehow shapeshifts into the old witch and kills a baby in an evil sacrifice. A kindly local Catholic priest, Father Juan (Julián Mateos), realizes that Susan is possessed but when he talks to the local Police Chief (Fernando Sancho) about it, the town's top cop isn't quite convinced. Meanwhile, a journalist named William Grant (Daniel Martin) is skulking about, trying to figure out exactly what is going on here.
Very clearly one of many rip-offs of The Exorcist, Demon Witch Child is, if not especially originally, pretty damn entertaining. It’s sleazy, weird and over the top in a lot of ways, never concerned with subtlety so much as it is with blatant exploitation, but Ossorio paces the movie really effectively and the picture is never dull. There are some extremely memorable set pieces in here and you’ve got to give Salgado credit for really going for it when her character becomes possessed.
Production values are pretty solid. The makeup effects aren’t always one hundred percent convincing but they’re strange enough to make you take notice. There are some quality gore effects on display in the movie as well, and it’s all set to an effectively quirky score that helps keep the pace. There’s also quite a bit of decent atmosphere on display in the film’s second half. Again, this is clearly a knock off picture mean to cash in on the box office success of Friedkin’s Oscar winner, but if you can get past this, Demon Witch Child is a really entertaining slice of supernatural seventies schlock.
Note that people who know the film better than this writer have noted that the castration scene in the movie is missing a shot of the boyfriend's pants being unzipped and that some dialogue related to this is missing. Additionally, a scene at the end of the movie where we see a shot of a forehead being burned is repeated twice.
Curse of the Devil / The Vampires Night Orgy / Demon Witch Child – Blu-ray Review:
Vinegar Syndrome brings this trilogy to Blu-ray in a three-disc region free set, with each film "scanned and restored in 4K from their 35mm original camera negatives". Curse Of The Devil is framed at 2.35.1 widescreen while the other two films are framed at 1.85.1 widescreen. There’s a bit if minor visible print damage in the opening minutes of Curse Of The Devil but a few minutes into the movie and it’s gone, with the rest of the picture looking just fine. The Vampire’s Night Orgy is pretty clean from start to finish, showing little more than the odd small white speck here and there, while Demon Witch Child follows suit. All three films show nice detail and avoid any noticeable compression artifacts, edge enhancement or noise reduction. There’s plenty of natural film grain present throughout, and the movie show nice color reproduction and good depth and texture.
Each film gets an original Spanish language track and a dubbed English language track in 24-bit DTS-HD Mono, with optional English subtitles. The English dub for Demon Witch Child is ridiculously bad and essentially makes the film impossible to take seriously (a difficult task even in its Spanish language option) but it’s great that it, and the dubs for the other two movies, is included here. Audio quality is fine across the board, the tracks are clean, clear and properly balanced, though some sibilance creeps in during a few moments.
Extra features are spread across the three discs in this set as follows:
Curse Of The Devil:
Extras start off with a thirteen minute interview with Sergio Molina, son of actor/co-writer Paul Naschy that covers where Naschy's career was at during this period after the success of Werewolf's Shadow, the popularity of werewolf movies in Spain at the time, his father's love of history and of the romantics and how this influenced his films, how Naschy tried to humanize his villainous characters, his love of period shoots and Hammer-esque atmosphere, the impact that the Universal horror films had on his father's work, the use of gore in Naschy's pictures, the directors that Naschy worked with and more.
Up next is a fifteen minute interview with Sitges Film Festival director Ángel Sala that discusses the popularity of Naschy's werewolf movies in his native Spain, how the character of Waldemar Daninsky resonated with audiences of the day both in Spain and abroad, how the Daninsky movies don't really have a continuity, the production values on display in these films, now Naschy essentially created his own mythology with his films, how his films explore the concept of the werewolf curse, influences that work their way into Naschy's werewolf pictures, Naschy's relationship with Carlos Aured and the enduring popularity of these movies.
The disc also includes Paul Naschy: Interview With The Werewolf, a fifteen minute archival interview with Paul Naschy carried over from the older Anchor Bay DVD release where he talks about his childhood, the influence of horror movies on him as a kid and how he carried that with him into adulthood, how he got into acting after his work as an athlete, how he came to be cast as Waldemar Daninsky, where he took his stage name from, the difficulties of making genre films in Spain during this period in history, how his films reflect the state of Spain when they were made, dealing with censors, the effects work needed for the werewolf films he starred in and his thoughts on the distribution and retitling of many of his pictures for the international market.
The first disc also contains the original Spanish and English language trailers for the feature as well as the alternate ‘clothed scenes’ from the international version and an alternate English language main title sequence.
The Vampire's Night Orgy:
Extras on disc two start off with an interview with actor Jack Taylor that runs nine minutes. He speaks here about his work with Leon Klimovsky and how much he enjoyed working with him, memories of some of his co-stars on this film, his work with Osorio, hanging out with Ray Milland, how prolific and knowledgeable about cinema Klimovsky was, getting along with the film's producer, the main small town location used for the movie and why he looks back on his career in film with such fondness.
From where, we get another interview with Sitges Film Festival director Ángel Sala, this one running thirteen minutes. In this piece, Sala goes over the "fantaterror" boom that was happening in Spain in the early seventies, Leon Klimovsky's role in that movement and the popularity of his genre films, what made The Vampire's Night Orgy different from other vampire films made around the same time, what sets Klimovsky's genre efforts apart from many of his contemporaries, the influence of Spanish history on the film, thoughts on some of the stand out scenes in the film and what makes them effective, the effectiveness of the village location and quite a bit more.
Last up is a twelve minute interview with filmmaker Victor Matellano that covers Klimovsky's work in Spanish cinema and how well he was regarded by so many of the people that worked with him, thoughts on many of the actors that collaborated with him over the years, how resourceful the director was while making his films, what makes The Vampire's Night Orgy a film worth discovering, the surreal atmosphere inherent in a few scenes, thoughts on the performances in the film including Jack Taylor's work on the picture and the importance of his presence in the film, the film's connections to other Spanish horror films of the era and why he feels Klimovsky is underrated compared to so many of the other Spanish horror filmmakers.
Demon Witch Child:
An twenty-two minute interview with actress Marian Salgado where she talks about how she got her start as an actress as a kid doing television work, making the shift to film productions, what she likes about acting, different productions that she starred in during the early part of her career, how she came to dub Linda Blair in The Exorcist for its Spanish release and how this led to her being cast in Demon Witch Child, what it was like working with Ossorio on the production, memories of some of her co-stars and of shooting specific scenes for the movie, the makeup that she had to undergo for the production, some of the films that she made after Demon Witch Child and some of the people she collaborated with on those movies, how she's gotten back into acting recently and how being a child actor shaped her as an adult.
Marian Salgado at Fancine de Lemos film festival is a six-minute piece where the actor makes an appearance at the aforementioned film festival where some of her work was being screened. She's interviewed briefly here as well, about some of the people she worked with and the films that they made together.
The disc also contains a ten minute introduction by Ángel Sala, Carlos Benítez and Xavi Sánchez Pons covering the origins of the film, how Marian Salgado came to work on the picture and the importance of her presence in the movie, different folk elements that are incorporated into the narrative and the visuals, thoughts on the different characters that appear in the movie, the film's makeup effects and how the movie was promoted when initially released.
The last featurette is a twenty-three minute featurette with Ángel Sala and Xavi Sánchez Pons where they do a deep dive into the state of Spanish genre cinema when the movie was made, the impact that the success of The Exorcist had on filmmaking, other knock offs of The Exorcist that came out of Europe during this period and how they compare to Demon Witch Child, what makes these movies as entertaining as they are even if they aren't especially original, how they compare to more modern films dealing with possession and exorcism and why some of these films remain very popular decades since being released to cash in on a box office hit.
Finishing up the extras is an English language trailer for the movie under the alternate title of The Possessed.
As far as the packaging goes, this set comes with a spot gloss hard slipcase and slipcover combo designed by Robert Sammelin which is limited to 6,000 units, along with some nice reversible cover sleeve art.
Curse of the Devil / The Vampires Night Orgy / Demon Witch Child – The Final Word:
Vinegar Syndrome's triple feature Blu-ray upgrade of Curse Of The Devil / The Vampire’s Nighty Orgy and Demon Witch Child offers up three Spanish horror imports, presented in very nice shape and with a strong selection of extra features. There’s loads of entertainment value to be had here, each of the three films well-worth seeing in its own right. Recommended!
