1963's "The Blancheville Monster," filmed in Spain by Italian director Alberto De Martino, turns out to be just a routine black and white Poe pastiche. American International's TV branch would buy up foreign titles from Europe (Britain, Italy and Spain in particular) and Japan (Daiei's Gamera series) before dubbing and going straight to television; who knows if any of them would be remembered today had the studio not decided to cut down production expenses in the US by furnishing features already completed and no doubt cheaper to purchase (their color package lacked the lucrative Poe series, so Samuel Z. Arkoff substituted Larry Buchanan's infamous octet of Azaleas, using scripts already conceived, and even previously filmed). The generic original title "Horror" notwithstanding, "Blancheville" is a decidedly dreary story without a satisfying payoff, the pretty heiress to the De Blancheville estate in Northern France returning to celebrate her upcoming birthday, only to receive shocking news from her brother (Gerard Tichy, "Face of Terror," "Hatchet for the Honeymoon") that their supposedly deceased father, disfigured in a fire, is not only alive but has escaped his tower prison in an attempt to prevent his daughter from instigating family termination by turning 21. The local doctor comes under suspicion as well, carrying a volume on hypnotism in his medical kit, while the menacing housekeeper (Helga Line) has been brandishing a possibly lethal syringe from mysterious bottles. The arresting climax finds our cataleptic heroine being buried alive, the camera showing her perspective from inside the coffin, watching the mourners through a glass opening but unable to move. Christopher Lee or Barbara Steele might have resuscitated this dead horse but they are sadly absent, drawn out in tedious dialogue exchanges with very little atmosphere but some titillation provided by diaphanous gowns, both blondes interchangeable (think "House of Usher" without Vincent Price, or even Del Tenney's "The Curse of the Living Corpse"). Helga Line went on to become one of Europe's most prominent femme fatales, letting her hair down (often completely nude) in well known items like "Nightmare Castle," "Horror Express," "Horror Rises from the Tomb," "The Vampires Night Orgy," "The Dracula Saga," "The Mummy's Revenge," "The Lorelei's Grasp," and "Black Candles."
Review of The Blancheville Monster
