The Night Boredom Crawled Into My Head
by Rich Bruso
October, 2004
So, there I was, sitting, horrified, in front of my television. I was near tears, seeing a body that lovely defiled by inclusion in such a horrible movie. And before I receive any complaints, I’m not talking about an actress. I am referring, of course, to the classic Lamborghini driven by the star of this month’s movie, The Night Evelyn Came out of the Grave.
Now, I won’t say this is a bad movie. Never that. Bad isn’t the correct word. In fact, I could be quoted as saying it is a good movie, but that quote will probably be out of context. What this movie happens to be is an absolute waste of a good blank DVD. I would have felt less cheated if it were, in fact, blank, as I would only have to stare at it for a second or two. But no, instead I’m forced to watch as one hundred long, long minutes drizzle slowly across the screen.
It is quite international, though. It was filmed in England by an Italian film company. This leads to some strange dubbing sequences, as a lot of the shots that involve extras were in English, translated first to Italian, then back to English for the video release. The remaining shots forego the first round of dubbing, but aren’t much better. And it looks like one part of the castle was reused for filming the insane asylum scenes. Oh, and you can see the guy holding up the smoke machine on the castle turret, which the filmmakers apparently mistook for a particularly ornate chimney.
Anyway, let’s look at the basic elements of this movie. We have the millionaire playboy, an exotic car (two if you count the oddball Jaguar with ambulance lights), a castle, dungeons, whips, chains, and several ladies of the night. Oh, and somewhere between zero and one ghost, a snake-wielding assassin (really), two totally different crypts, and a shag carpeted set of spiral stairs.
Aside from the last, all these items have potential. Maybe the Lamborghini is used by the millionaire to fight crime, coming out of his secret hideout in the dungeon of the castle? Nope. Okay, maybe instead he’s an international spy, bent on stopping an international prostitution ring, where the enforcers kill off competitors with a slash of the viper? Again, nope. Well then, what is the plot?
How about weak, thin, or perhaps overdone. Basically, Alan, the millionaire playboy, lost his wife in childbirth after she took another lover, so he went insane, eventually escaped the mental institution, and now, in his free time, lures red-haired prostitutes to his large castle, where he murders them in a grizzly, messy, and, above all, off-screen way. All this changes when his cousin introduces him to a redheaded stripper, who he kills.
Okay, so it didn’t change then, but later he meets a nice blonde woman, who he promptly marries. Maybe this makes sense in England, or Italy, or wherever. Alan’s creepy aunt takes charge and hires a whole household of identical, white wigged maids to tend to the castle. Things start getting creepy when someone takes Alan’s glass of milk (really) and a redhead is spotted roaming the castle grounds. Is it his dead wife, back from the grave? Is it an imposter? Is this movie almost over? This last question was weighing heavily on my mind at this point.
It turns out the answer was no. At least another half hour to go, and Alan’s new wife hadn’t even noticed the awful portrait of Evelyn. As far as portraits go, you can tell this one has a date with either a sword or a fire, as it appears to have been painted using the basic 8 color generic crayon set.
Convinced Evelyn has come back and is haunting the castle, the new wife pays the night watchman of the local graveyard to open the tomb. But wait, Evelyn’s tomb was already seen on the castle grounds, over a half hour away. Perhaps Evelyn really died in an unfortunate amateur magic trick gone horribly awry. Not surprisingly, there’s no body in the coffin, in either tomb. At this point, someone pulls a snake out of their pocket and entices it to bite the groundskeeper in a quite fatal manner. I can only assume the actor wanted more money than the budget would allow.
Next, we wander through several more murders, including the fox-induced death of Alan’s aunt. This leads, naturally, to the obligatory “ex wife’s portrait destruction sequence” which always appears in this kind of movie, even though it was growing old when Sophocles was still writing plays. Undaunted by a plot more full of holes than a block of Swiss cheese, the producers push on to the grand finale, during which pretty much everyone dies except for the prostitute murdering millionaire, proving once again that, since crime doesn’t pay, it’s best to already have some money to pay off the cops.
Fortunately, there was a happy ending. I turned off the movie, and an episode of Spongebob Squarepants was ending. It was one of my favorites, involving a special visit from the vampire from the original vampire movie, Nosferatu. Now that would have been worth watching.
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