The wet-blanket editors at "Maltin's Movie Guide" have done it again. "Poorly done," they sniff, giving a measly 1 1/2 stars to Spanish director Vicente Aranda's 1972 offering, "The Blood Spattered Bride." Countering this claim is the very laudatory review in "DVD Delirium," which describes the picture with words such as "bizarre," "visceral," "sexy" and "dreamlike." I concur. This film, I feel, presented in its uncensored form on this great-looking DVD from Blue Underground, should prove a godsend of sorts for all lovers of adult Eurohorror. In it, a new bride moves into the childhood home of her husband, and is soon plagued by stroboscopic and hideously, uh, heart-gripping dreams featuring a beautiful blond woman. When her husband finds this dream gal buried naked at the beach, with only her snorkel protruding from the surface (one very strange scene, lemme tell you!), and brings her back home, that's when the fun begins, as the woman, Carmilla (yes, this IS another variation of Sheridan Le Fanu's oft-filmed 1871 novella), turns out to be nothing less than a bloodsucking...but perhaps I've already said too much. Featuring uniformly fine acting by all (sexy Maribel Martin as the young bride, giallo favorite Simon Andreu as the perplexed husband, the ridiculously gorgeous Alexandra Bastedo as Carmilla, and Rosa Rodriguez as a pretty 12-year-old who, in perhaps the film's strangest scene, drinks from a humongous cup of coffee), a subtle yet effective score by Antonio Perez Olea, beautiful outdoor photography of woodlands, seaside and moldering crypts, and some genuinely shocking bursts of gory carnage, this movie is my idea of an almost perfect horror package. Peppered with psychosexual allusions and concluding on a note both bleak and grisly, the film was a very pleasant surprise for me, and one that I do highly recommend. If you love the great "Daughters of Darkness," you should certainly suck this one right up. Don't trust Maltin here; trust me!
Review of The Blood Spattered Bride
