REVIEW DATE: 10:25:0:0
I watched this movie on pain killers. They cost $30. Halfway through The Craving I realized I could have just rented this movie in the first place and saved myself the $30. Somehow, by some arcane sorcery, writer/director Jacinto Molina (aka Paul Naschy) has managed commit the very essence of Codine to film.
Want a cheap pain killer that can also distort time and space? Rent this movie.
Festivities begin sometime in the middle ages. Countess Bathory (Silvia Aguilar), exposed as a witch/vampire/whatever-the-hell-else is condemned to burn at the stake until dead (redundant? I think so). Her hench people are condemned as well, with one unfortunate gentleman convicted of lycathropy. This guy, Mr. Waldemar Daninsky (Molina again), gets a silver cross shoved through his heart. May he rest in peace.
Centuries later, 3 "college students" (who look about 30-ish) travel to Countess Bathory's old, *ahem*, haunt, intent on proving Bathory's legend (ya know, the one were she will rise from the grave?) is true. But one girl, Erica, is a bit too into the legend. She's been having psychic pow-wows with Bathory's ghost and plans to sacrifice her 2 friends and provoke the devil woman's resurrection. Why? Just wacky, I guess.
Thankfully for humanity (?), two stupid grave robbers pull the silver cross from Daninsky's chest. Daninsky comes to life and makes quick doggy snacks of them.
Good thing bodies decay really fast in the Carpathians, because here come our three nubile college students. In a sequence that practically screams "Judicious Editing!" our heroines end up having a nice, civilized supper in Waldemar's nice, civilized castle a quick jump-cut after their first meeting. The castle shows none of the neglect and dust common with being abandoned to evil spirits for 400 years or so, by the way. Werewolves need ood maids.
So, after dinner, the Wald man invites the maddens to say . . . a bad move that just had me screaming, "Bad move, asshole!" Sure enough, Erica finds and frees the Countess, and is immediately vampireized herself. Time for the plot to start, right?
Wrong, boy-oh. It's time for an hour of nothing. That's right, nothing. Oh sure, Karen and Wald fall in love and the Countess starts an evil plan of some kind, but I'll be damned if I can remember any details.
Right around here, time seemed to fold inward on itself. I'm not sure where the hell my mind went, but, apparently, my hands kept scribbling notes. Here's a few that, somehow, remained legible:
¶ Dim light = bad!
¶ No characters! None. NONE! Just walking victims. And oh, how they walk and walk and walk and walk around a dark castle, and it's all spooky. If only this asshole knew how to direct.
¶ Have any Roman college students ever seen a Hammer movie?
¶ Waldemar looks like the Werewolf of Paris, if the werewolf of Paris looked like a bear. Were-bear? Now there's a scare. Next thing you know they'll be were-hares, were-mares and *gasp*, were-chairs!
¶ Seriously, guys, it's called a "pentagram. Not a pentagon, not a pentagan, it's a pentagram. Bad dubbing = bad!
¶ Is the Countess a vampire? Is she a witch? She's a witch! She's made of wood! Burn her! Oh no, wait, they already tried that. Build a bridge out of her! But, wait, if she's a vampire and she's made of wood, we can break off a piece of her and stab her in the heart with herself!
¶ The Wald man's a kinder, gentler kind of werewolf. He kills his victims, sure, he has to to be the tragic hero and stuff, but, he never eats anyone, oh no. He just bites 'um and leaves 'um.
¶ Wald's line: "Sleep overtakes me, but I must stay awake, or I shall become enslaved." I feel your pain, man.
¶ Fuzzy bunnies (I don't know where it came from, but there you are.)
¶ Damn, but their romance moves fast. Let's see, Karen is a 1980s college student and Wald is a medieval lord cursed with werewolfisam. Wow, soul mates.
¶ Whoever dubbed this hired voice actors who could actually do some voice acting. We may not get good dialogue, but at least we get intonation and inflection. Now, who the hell is supposed to have the eastern European accent and why doesn't he keep it?
¶ Why, God? Why?
¶ All work and no play makes Doc Psy a dull boy. (This sentence repeats itself several hundred times over the next five or so notebook pages.)
After that, I may have blacked out at some point. Thankfully (?) I woke up just in time for the climactic battle between Wolfy and Bathory. Now, I love a good monster fight as much as the next guy. This, however, is not such a fight. Wolfy vs. Bathory consists of the two grappling for awhile, until Wolfy puts the bite on his former mistress. Not exactly a Death Match worthy of the main event.
This is a Spanish movie, believe it or not, and Spain (along with big brother, Italy) seem to permanently stuck about 20 years behind the English speaking countries of the world when it comes to horror movies. The Craving practically oozes Hammer-ness from every frame. There's the gothic castle, the Evil Non-Virgin Vampires and the Doomed Werewolf who's really a Nice Guy but, too bad, he's still a werewolf and still has to die.
Unfortunately, though he knows all the elements, Molina can't make the damn thing work. His directing is placid and uninteresting, like the people he's shooting on screen. Tension and drama flat line because we (the audience) aren't involved with the goings on. The people are boring the whole damn thing is boring. And I just don't care.
I don't care if the movie started out this bad, or if it was sodomized by its English distributors. The end result is the same: a knockout pill of a movie. Don't raise this from the grave, no matter what the voices in your head say.
Gs (out of a possible five)
MOCK O' METER
