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Revenge of the Blood Beast
[Blu-ray]
Blu-ray ALL - United Kingdom - Raro Video Review written by and copyright: Eric Cotenas (12th August 2024). |
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The Film
 British newlyweds Phillip (Wuthering Heights' Ian Ogilvy) and Veronica (Shivers' Barbara Steele) get lost in Vaubrac, Transylvania on the way from Sofia to Bucharest, having taken directions to the Eastern Bloc's announced but as-yet non-existent autobahn, where the only hotel is run by the appropriately named lech Groper (Little Shop of Horrors' Mel Welles). They are regaled with the region's tales of witchcraft and Satanism by the last of the Van Helsings (Slaughter Hotel's John Karlsen) whose family got rid of all the Draculas and sundry vampires but he claims he himself is waiting in case he needs to deal with the return of the witch Vardella who was able to utter a curse on the village two hundred years ago because the townspeople executed her without waiting for his ancestor to exorcise her. When Philip and Veronica catch Groper spying on them in bed, Philip beats the man savagely and believes he has killed him. The couple make a getaway at dawn not knowing that Groper has tampered with their car and they crash into the lake trying to avoid a collision with a truck driver (Ugly, Dirty and Bad's Tony Antonelli). The driver pulls the two out of the lake, Philip still alive but Veronica apparently dead, and takes them to Groper and tells him to wait to contact the police so he can disappear. When Philip regains consciousness, he discovers that the other body pulled out of the lake is not Veronica but a disfigured old hag. Van Helsing insists that Vardella has taken over Veronica and the only way to get her back is to exorcise the witch. Philip does not believe him and attempts to find his wife's body. Meanwhile, Vardella wakes up and starts slaughtering the descendants of her persecutors. Michael Reeves had made short films on 8mm and 16mm as a child before taking it upon himself to travel to Los Angeles and appear on the doorstep of Don Siegel expressing his admiration for the then-jobbing director and wound up crewing on some of his productions uncredited. Reeves was doing second unit direction on Castle of the Living Dead when he met producer Paul Maslansky (Death Line) who would produce the then twenty-three year old Reeves' directorial debut Revenge of the Blood Beast. Working from a script co-written by Roger Corman associate Charles B. Griffith (A Bucket of Blood) and the strong (possibly overbearing) influence of Welles (whose children appear in the film) – who would later take a more somber approach to his own Italian-lensed genre effort Lady Frankenstein – the film is stuck somewhere between horror and comedy rather than being a straight horror-comedy. Working from a scenario that would be approached more straight-faced by any other filmmaker given the material, Reeves seems more interested in handling the atmospherics – including the execution of the witch which seems like a visual dry-run for the powerful opening sequence of his magnum opus and swan song Witchfinder General (Reeves died of an accidental overdose in 1969 at age twenty-five) – while Steele, Ogilvy, and Karlsen do their best with the campy dialogue and constant jokes about Eastern Bloc communism which is only delivered with any real gusto by Welles and Griffith himself who has a cameo as a bicycling policeman who gives the couple directions to the best hotel in town. After a long middle stretch of repetitive action and comedy – the killings of the descendents which would be the highlight of any genuine Italian horror film are mostly offscreen apart from one sequence in a church in which Vardella drops a bloody sickle next to a discarded hammer – while Lucretia Love (The Devil with Seven Faces) provides some nudity in a rape scene presumably as illustrative of authoritarian corruption as the seizure of the Van Helsing castle by the government (anticipating the move that sent Dracula to the states in Love at First Bite), and the film rushes to its ending with a comical car chase and a nod to The Fearless Vampire Killers. The film attracted the attention of distributor Tigon and Reeves would get to express himself more fully with his follow-up The Sorcerers (besides Witchfinder General, Reeves was preparing The Oblong Box and had worked on a script for Hammer's Crescendo before his death). Neither a masterpiece of Reeves or jewel of Steele's Italian horror golden age, Revenge of the Blood Beast is nevertheless an integral puzzle piece in both of their careers. 
Video
Released in the U.K. by Miracle Films as Revenge of the Blood Beast and in the U.S. by Europix as "She Beast" – in a mismatching plain font while TV prints featured "The She Beast" in the same bloody lettering as the "Revenge" title – the film has been one of the more accessible Steele sixties horrors thanks to a center-cropped VHS release from Gorgon Video in the eighties which was the source for many a PD DVD edition (an Italian TV recording making the bootlegs rounds with the alternate "Il lago di Satana" title was cropped to 1.85:1) until Dark Sky Films gave fans an official anamorphic widescreen DVD in 2009 featuring the aformentioned plain font "She Beast" title while the British title was restored to Raro Video's 2017 Blu-ray. Radiance Films' 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 2.35:1 widescreen Blu-ray makes use of the same HD master - at a higher bitrate - which was brighter and more colorful than the Dark Sky transfer in which day-for-night scenes were near impenetrable and probably true to the 35mm theatrical prints. The HD master features more-or-less the same framing but the increased brightness does not undermine the lighting of scenes shot under more controlled conditions. 
Audio
Wheras Raro only offered the English dub track – which featured Ogilvy's voice but not Steele's – for their U.S. edition, their Radiance Films-curated U.K. edition includes both English and Italian LPCM 2.0 mono tracks as well as English SDH subtitles for the English track and English subtitles for the Italian track that reveal some differences between the tracks. Both tracks lean heavily on the bombastic scoring of popular orchestrator Ralph Ferraro – Reeves' composer on his subsquent films Paul Ferris (The Creeping Flesh) also apparently contributed some work to the score – in place of atmospheric effects in the threadbare sound design. 
Extras
Ported from the Dark Sky edition is an audio commentary by producer Paul Maslansky & actors Ian Ogilvy and Barbara Steele, moderated by David Gregory recorded even earlier in 2007 in which Ogilvy reveals that the film was shot under the title "Etruscan Ruins" as a documentary for licensing purposes and Maslansky reveals how he met Reeves. Steele joins them shortly after her character appears onscreen, and the actors have fun flattering each other and picking apart their own onscreen work. Maslansky recalls how he had Steele sign a contract to work for one day without specifying that the day would be eighteen hours long for which Steele did not talk to him for another decade before they made up. They also discuss the shooting conditions, actor/dancer Joe 'Flash' Riley scaring the locals by going around in Vardella make-up between takes, and Ogilvy offers a counterpoint to Steele's and Maslansky's waxing about living in Italy during the sixties as he discovered that when you have no money, there certainly is bad, cheap Italian food. New to the Radiance edition is "Ian Ogilvy on Revenge of the Blood Beast" (12:57) in which the actor reiterates some of the same anecdotes about the film but goes into more detail about meeting Reeves as a child, shooting a film with him in 8mm and then intending to play the same part the next year in a 16mm version only to fall ill and have to be cared for by Reeves' mother during his stay. He muses on how big Reeves would have been had he lived and if the director would have cast him again after playing the leads in his three films.  Also new is "Kim Newman on Revenge of the Blood Beast" (19:32) in which the author/critic rehashes the anecdote about an argument between Reeves and Witchfinder General star Vincent Price that Reeves put up his "three good movies" against the star's larger filmography to ponder a) whether Reeves might have directed Castle of the Living Dead rather than Warren Kiefer – while noting that Reeves never claimed to have directed it – or b) whether he actually regarded Revenge of the Blood Beast as a good film. Ported from the Raro edition is "A Bloody Journey to Italy" (28:50), an audio interview with Steele which is more career-wide, covering her discovery by Rank while she was in art school, her Fox contract and the experience on the set of the Elvis vehicle Flaming Star that had her dropping everything and flying to Italy and a wide-ranging discussion of her horror work interspersed with her art house credits. 
Packaging
This limited edition of three-thousand copies comes with a reversible cover and a booklet by Kevin Lyons, author of "The Encyclopedia of Fantastic Film and Television" (neither of which were supplied for review).
Overall
Neither a masterpiece of young director Michael Reeves or jewel of Barbara Steele's Italian horror golden age, Revenge of the Blood Beast is nevertheless an integral puzzle piece in both of their careers.
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