There is a significant difference between the worst films shot on film and those on video. Film requires more expensive equipment, money to pay a lab to process it, an editor to undertake the costly process of linear editing, prints to be made. When somebody makes that kind of investment, a filmmaker usually tends to give more thought to what they’re doing. Then I saw 1971’s Necrophagous (a.k.a. The Butcher of Binbrook) and that theory went all to Hell. This Spanish gothic horror film is a mess to the extent that I wonder why anybody associated with it bothered.
The chronology is so scattered as to suggest the negative was cut and reassembled at random. One of the picture’s great many problems is those jumps backwards or forwards in time rarely happen with any communication to the audience this is what is happening. It isn’t like this is Momento, so there’s no reason for the scrambled timeline. I will be more merciful than the filmmakers, as I try to summarize the plot in the order those events occurred chronologically.
Bill Curran has returned to the family home to find his wife (Inés Morales) died in childbirth and his brother has gone missing. The wife of that missing brother (Catherine Ellison) is acting cagey, and it turns out she has a strange sexual relationship with a nefarious doctor (Frank Braña) who is always hanging around the family’s huge and ancient house. That doctor may be connected to weird experiments happening on the bodies masked figures have been stealing from the cemetery, including that of Curran’s wife. There’s also the creepy caretaker of that cemetery (Victor Isreal) and a police detective (J.R. Clarke) seemingly always in the periphery everything that happens. Lastly, there’s Curran’s weird mother-in-law (Maria Paz Madrid) and her daughters, whom we see in flashbacks trying to seduce him even while he’s married to their sister. About halfway through the picture, Curran goes missing.
Let’s address one of those last items, the seduction of Madrid’s daughters, first. Some of the funniest moments here, though I doubt intentionally, are Madrid somehow being right there when those various sexual antics occur. In one moment, she’s right outside a bedroom window as one of the daughters unsuccessfully tries to put the moves on Curran. I like to think that window was higher up than the first floor, if only because she would have had to have gone to even more trouble be a peeping Maria. Another time, two of the sisters watch Curran and Morales about to engage in outdoors sex, in a moment which has creepy overtones of incest—and then there is Madrid watching them watching. It is a whole matryoshka of ick, likely with even more layers I don’t care to explore.
I laughed heartily at those flashbacks, but another one is almost as hilarious. In the only extensive scene when Morales is still alive, all she does is ask repeatedly whether a letter has arrived from her husband. This goes on for so long, and her behavior is so outrageously pathetic, that this was the only time I genuinely wondered if it was intentional humor.
Some aspects of this production are strange enough to be memorable. One is the recurring motif of a song Curran is always whistling. I swear the first six notes of it are identical to “On Top Of Old Smokey”, only to diverge into a different tune. We will hear this so many times that it becomes deeply annoying, and not just because the brain consistently expects it to follow the course of that old standard. But we’ll hear Curran whistle it approximately one hundred times (at least that’s what it feels like), and that’s not when he’s playing it on the harmonica.
About that harmonica: there’s another moment which is very funny when he’s on a train and seated across from an old woman who gives him some serious side-eye when he starts playing that instrument. Tellingly, she asks him how far he’s travelling. And he even plays it in the cemetery during the funeral of a stranger, which seems like an extreme and entirely new form of disrespect.
At least those moments are more distinct than the great many ways the movie is incompetent. The seasons seem to change from one cut to another, with a great deal of snow in one shot and none in the matching cut. I swear it is summer in one bit where Curran is on horseback and then winter when he arrives at his destination. That must have been one long ride. Also, there will be zooms in and out and changes in focus for no apparent reason. A conversation between Curran and Israel eschews the typical over-the-shoulder alternating shots to instead switch between nearly identical perspectives. Terrible effects have what are obviously mannequin heads in bad wigs trying to pass for severed human heads. It’s no surprise the performances are uniformly terrible, and likely would have been so even in whatever language the actors were speaking in before they were dubbed.
When Necrophagous isn’t confusing or garnering unintended laughs, it is simply weird for only its own sake. That woman on the train? It will be revealed she was carrying a dead piglet in her suitcase. There’s the cemetery which Isreal repeatedly says is always locked, and yet there’s always people there, which isn’t just contrary to his claim but even means people who have apparently no business there are still hanging around. Then again, Madrid at one point chastises her daughters for not being ready to accompany her there. As she says, “I would like to know who’s getting buried”, so I guess she simply goes each time there’s another burial, without even knowing who is getting interred. Seems like somebody desperate for entertainment, not unlike me after enduring this picture.
Dir: Miguel Madrid
Starring Bill Curran, Catherine Ellison
Watched as part of Severin’s blu-ray box set Danza Macabra Vol. Three: The Spanish Gothic Collection