Question of The Day

IF YOU STRANGLE A SMURF, WHAT COLOR DOES IT TURN?
…Woody Paige

Overlooked Movies: Black Sabbath(1964)

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Boris karloff, Overlooked Movies

A little investigation shows me that there are two versions of this horror movie: the original Italian, I Tre volti della paura(English translation, The Three Faces of Fear), and the American-International release, Black Sabbath. The changes in the English language edition have a different running order of the segments, a different score, the focus of one segment changed entirely, and new scenes of Boris Karloff’s role as narrator with a humorous bent.

Karloff serves as host/narrator of the three stories and appears in one as well.

Three stories: The Drop of Water, The Telephone, and the longest piece(the last half of the film), The Wurdalak.

The Drop of Water concerns a nurse come to prepare the dead body of a medium for burial who steals a large sapphire ring from a finger on the old woman’s hand. A glass is knocked over, starting water dripping from the table edge, and a fly, there to investigate the smell of death, annoys her. She returns home with her prize, only to be annoyed by that same fly(?) and the sound of dripping water, continuing to besiege her as her fear mounts.

The Telephone is the segment completely changed around. Originally a noirish tale of revenge and murder, the changes turned it into a ghost story. In the original, an Italian prostitute begins receiving a series of phone calls from her ex-pimp, just escaped from prison, and it was her testimony that put him away. A lesbian subplot was edited out of the English language film, a scene reshot, and the dialogue changed. Suddenly the ex-pimp is a dead man seeking revenge, the girl friend she calls is just that, a friend.

The Wurdalak(based on a story by Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy) had Boris Karloff as the patriarch of a family beset by a Turkish thief. A young nobleman traveling at night finds a man slumped on a horse with a knife in his back and leads the animal until he finds a big, castle-like house. Two young men greet him and recognize the dagger in the body. It belongs to the Karloff character who left the house to track down the Turkish thief, telling them if he didn’t return in five days(just a few hours from now), it would be too late and not to let him in if he showed up later.

Five people in the house, Karloff’s two daughters, his son, a son-in-law, and a grandson.

The nobleman wants to stay the night, though that is discouraged, finally agreed to by all.

And then dear old dad comes home late in the night and they forget his warning. The trouble starts shortly.

A pretty sedate vampire story(all the gore from the Italian edition was edited out), but not bad.

One final note: at the end of the Wikipedia entry, in the trivia section, it’s said that an English band named Earth borrowed the film title as their own and went on to great heights. I don’t know about this one. Never heard the story before and the wikipedia entry on the band doesn’t mention the connection. Who knows?

For more overlooked movies, go to Todd Mason’s SWEET FREEDOM.