Cauldron of Blood (1970)

Such a frustrating disappointment

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.

Funny, strange, confrontational and subversive, this is one of the most interesting experiences you'll have at the cinema this year.

The legendary Barbara Steele has nothing on Viveca Lindfors in this cheezy horror film from late in the career of Boris Karloff. He is a blind artist who blames wife Lindfors for the loss of his eyesight and his paralysis, claiming that she tried to kill him but failed. But now she's a dutiful wife, aiding him in his sculpting in a way he can't imagine. With an artist's commission about to expire, Lindfors longs for Karloff to finish his job, no matter what the cost. Make no bones about it, the job will be completed, even if the efforts to help are aided through brutal means.Some treacherous looking birds, a gypsy queen that looks like an old drag queen, a mute servant girl abused by her employer for knowing too much and inappropriately placed music add to this film's bizarre structure. The DVD print is certainly a ton better than the blurry, cheaply transferred VHS copy from 25 years ago, but it doesn't make the film any better. Jean Pierre Aumont is top billed but rather wasted. All he does is try to get an interview with Karloff (getting more than he bargained for) and chase girls around to music that might have been a good fit on "Laugh In" but sounds totally strange here. It's all about Lindfors and a bunch of Spanish and Italian speaking beauties in an exotic setting that really get all the attention. Much of the film seriously could have been edited, but then you wouldn't have all the sexy stuff expected in any European film of the 1960's.

I guess I am the odd man out here. I rather thought this film - a troubled production that took years to complete and finally hit the screen - was rather entertaining in a sick, undeniably twisted, bad way. Yes, it has some lamentable aspects. Karloff is ancient and it shows. The story has lots of continuity problems(remember it was completed over several years and was not released till a couple years after Karloff's death). It has a very perverse story line about Karloff, a great artist living in Spain, and his demented, tormenting wife, played with zeal by Viveca Lindfors, needing bodies for his sculptures. You see, even though he is blind, he still can sculpt based on armatures based on real remains. Karloff believes his wife is getting them one way, and she is definitely getting them another way. French photographer Jean Pierre Aumont smugs for the camera saying silently, "God, don't I look so charming." He isn't, but he is an adequate leading man if nothing else. The girls in the story, particularly the girl playing Elga and Rosenda Monteros as Valerie are lovely creatures at the very least. And what about Karloff? He is still good and still one of the best things about this film(though my greater inclination is to side with one of the nastiest female portrayals in film I've seen in some time by Ms. Lindfors). Karloff still has a commanding voice and presence, and this film role is much meatier than any of that garbage he did for Mexico at the very end of his life. This movie has much greater continuity and story line than any of those four horror stories of film. Cauldron of Blood is by no means a great film - nor a good film, but I did find it reasonably entertaining and I, for one, was never bored watching it. Really, how can you go wrong with King Karloff, Viveca Lindfors wearing a Nazi-like uniform with riding crop and nylon netting under her eyes having flashbacks of her youth as a pig-tailed blonde no less, a cauldron of acid that burns the flesh off of any carcass, and a fight scene in the dark with a blind man and his hateful wife. As Karloff's character says to his wife, having just accused her of causing him to be blind, "Till death do we part I suppose." Nobody ever said a line like Boris!

Boris Karloff, probably the greatest horror actor who ever lived, passed away in February 1969 and you can almost consider this a blessing since he didn't had to experience the release of this movie that way. "Cauldron of Blood" is an awful 70's Euro-trash production and Karloff-admirers shouldn't remember like he looked here: an ill and crippled old man who had to star in inferior productions until his death. Like another reviewer around here cleverly pointed out, this film looks like it was edited together in bits and pieces and new footage was only shot when the makers had an extra nickel to spend. Karloff stars as the blind sculptor Badulescu who isn't aware that his fiendish wife and her masked lover provide him with murder victims to use as armatures for his artwork. Their idea is to get rich real quick but the whole plan threatens to get revealed when a reporter arrives in the seaside town with the idea to attract more tourists by making a publicity campaign about Badulescu's work. The basic premise is promising enough (it even reminds me a little of "House of Wax") but the execution is too incompetent for words. "Cauldron of Blood" is barely watchable, with entire sequences that seem to be missing and the camera that freeze-frames every time something terrible is about to happen to one of the characters. This could have been an exhilarating movie (and a worthy closure to Boris Karloff's career) but it turned out an unendurable mess, instead. It's a damn shame...

Not until three years after the death of Boris Karloff, EL COLECCIONISTA DE CADAVERES had his premiere at the cinema in August 1971. For me, it verges on the miraculous that this could happen anyhow. This obscure Spanish-American production was one of the last movies in which the master of the horror film appeared, but he could not enhance the movie in any way, being only a shadow of his former screen presence. The entire film, on which work began in February 1967 and lasted about three months, has not a single appealing scene to offer. It is so tedious that it is a real challenge to follow the "plot" without falling asleep. To make matters worse, J.P.Aumont and V.Lindfors are spectacular miscast. Especially Aumont torments the viewer, acting bored and arrogant. He is nothing less than a constant provocation for the paying audience. R.Rojo and R.Monteros on the other hand tend to heavy overacting, which doesn't support the film either. Thanks to the depressingly dumb screenplay, indifferent direction and annoyingly bad actors, EL COLECCIONISTA DE CADAVERES is one of the most wretched and unedifying movies of all time. In comparison to this, the movies Karloff made shortly after in Mexico are pure entertainment.