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We
open just before the turn of the last
century in Holland where Hans von Arnam (Pierre
Brice) navigates the foggy
canals to Dr. Wahl's windmill abode, which
houses the famous Carousel of Stone Women.
Kind of a screwed up version of Walt
Disney's It's a Small, Small World
attraction, the Carousel is an intricate
array of massive gears and pulleys that
operate a macabre animated display of
famous and infamous women -- and only
women, he said ominously -- posed at the
moment of their demise: Joan
of Arc at the stake. Marie Antoinette on
the chopping block etc.
Shows
at 4:00 and 4:30, and 2:00 matinees on
Saturdays. Senior Citizens half-price.
Kids under five admitted for free.
Arnam's
purpose at the famed artist's mill is a
little murky, but I believe he's there to
do an article on the quirky landmark (is
Holland's tourist industry this
desperate?). He meets Dr. Wahl (Herbert
Böhme) who graciously offers all
kinds of background material for Arnam's
article. He gets to work but is constantly
distracted
by the beautiful girl that he
keeps catching fleeting glimpses of ever
since he arrived. The shy girl is
Elfie (Scillia Gabel),
Wahl's daughter. Arnam tries to learn more
about her, but is gently told "hands
off" by Wahl -- and then not-so-gently
told "hands off" by Dr. Bolem (Wolfgang
Preiss), her
in-house physician. You see, Elfie has
inherited a strange condition where any
kind of emotional distress can prove
lethal. The same malady claimed Dr. Wahl's
wife. That's why she can never leave the
mill, and under no circumstances can she be --
well, aroused.
Things
are getting complicated for poor Arnam. Trying
to salvage his relationship with his old
girlfriend, Lisolette (Dany
Carrel), he's also smitten with the
mysterious girl. Things get even more
complicated when Elfie sneaks in a few
visits with him. It appears she's smitten
with him, too, and they arrange a late
night rendezvous -- if you know what I
mean, and I think you do. Elfie survives
the encounter, intact, which makes Arnam
wonder if Wahl's story is a load of bull,
and if Elfie's being held in the mill
against her will. Before he can
investigate further, Lisolette and his
friend Raab (Marco Guglielmi),
both art students of Wahl's at the local
university, stop by for a visit. Here,
Arnam realizes that Lisolette is the one
he truly loves, and wants to marry her. But
how does he break it to Elfie?
He
breaks the news during another one of her
late night visits. This definitely
qualifies as emotional distress for Elfie:
She turns pale, goes into spasm, and then
collapses. Arnam -- who really is kind of
a turd of hero, panics, scoops her up, and
takes her back to her room. Laying her on
the bed, he notices her face landed near a
hand mirror. It's not fogging up.
She's not breathing. Elfie is dead. Our
"hero" panics again and then clears
off the premises.
Like
I said, turd...
*
* * *
God
bless the fine folks over at Eccentric
Cinema. I've been trolling around over there
for awhile now, and you really should,
too, unearthing strange and oddball films
I'd never seen before, or really heard of,
but are now finally getting out on DVD.
It's been murder on my bank account, but
I've tracked down a half-dozen or so
titles that piqued my interest -- none of
them stranger, or more oddball for that
matter, than Georgio Ferroni's Mill
of the Stone Women.
One
part Grimm's Fairy Tale, one part Edgar
Wallace mystery, mixed with a little Mystery
of The Wax Museum
results in a strange concoction that's
long on mood and atmosphere with plenty of
strange characters and morbid plot twists
to keep things humming right along until
the real whiz-banger of a climax.
So
what's really going on at Dr. Wahl's wax
museum? Lets find out, shall we?
(She'd
tell you, but she's all tied up at the
moment. Mmwahahaahah...)
As
the guilt
eats away at our so-called hero, he returns to
the mill and sneaks into Elfie's bedroom.
She's not there. In fact, judging by all
the dust and cobwebs, the room appears to
have been unoccupied for a very long time. Baffled
by this, Arnam tries to sort it out. When
he runs into Bolem -- who sees the young
man is upset about something -- the doctor
offers Arnam a sedative to calm him down.
Things get curiouser and curiouser as
Bolem's sedative triggers a long,
phantasmagorical nightmare sequence for
Arnam: While the ghost of Elfie haunts him,
Wahl berates him for not listening.
It concludes with Arnam running about the
mill, and eventually, into the family
crypt where he desecrates Elfie's grave by
opening it up. Sure enough, Elfie's in
there. As Arnam
continues to wander around the mill in a
daze he hears a woman's haunted screams,
and follows the noise down into the mill's
sub-levels. Through
an open door, he
spies Amilore (Liana
Orfei -- last seen tormenting Hercules,
Samson & Ulysses), a
model who poses for Wahl's art classes,
tied to a chair. It slams shut before he
can get to her, though, and it won't
budge. Pounding on the door, wanting in,
Bolem comes on scene wanting to know
what's up. When Arnam tells what he saw, Bolem
is incredulous but unlocks the door
anyway. The room is empty.
Arnam
fears he's losing it and demands to speak
to Wahl. Bolem complies, and when he spills his
guts and confesses to killing Elfie, Wahl
doesn't seem too shocked by the news --
no, he thinks it's a pretty sick joke. Bolem
assures that Elfie is fine, but
Arnam just saw her entombed and she was
most definitely dead. The elder men
say that's nonsense, and worry about the
lad's mental state. Wahl calls for Elfie,
and she appears at the top of the steps
alive and well. Arnam's
circuits are a little fried by this
development. Wahl says he's willing to
forget the whole thing, but Arnam will
have to pack up and clear out. He also
strongly urges the boy to seek some
professional help. After he's gone, things
take a sinister turn. Bolem and Wahl have
a palaver. Bolem thinks they should have
killed Arnam, because Elfie is in love
with him. Wahl assures that over time, she
will forget him and Arnam is no longer a
threat. Their little drug induced acid
trip has seen to that. Bolem worries that
Arnam might come back and find out that
Elfie's been "dying for years"
and "how we restore her to
life."
What
the hell goes on here?
We
get our answer PDQ, as Wahl and Bolem
reveal the true nature of their treachery.
You see, Elfie really does have a sickness: a
rare blood disorder that requires a full-body
blood-transfusion every 3000 miles. And
Bolem has perfected a procedure to
accomplish this and keep her alive. Of
course, to also accomplish this, they need
a live donor. Lot's of donors, actually.
And if you're thinking what I'm thinking,
that all those gruesome displays on the
carousel are actually concealing the
bodies of all the previous donors, you get
a cookie.
So
down into the bowels of the mill we go,
where we find a bona fide mad scientist lair. While
Bolem
prepares Elfie for the transfusion, Wahl straps
the struggling Amilore to a gurney. Hooking
up both women to some kind of fancy
Rube Goldberg contraption, it first drains
all the bad blood out of Elfie, then sucks
all the good blood out of the unwilling
Amilore, and transfers it into Elfie. Of
course, the donor kind of gets the short
shrift here.
While
Elfie recovers, Wahl sets to work
converting Amilore's body into one of his
macabre display pieces. He's got some kind
of serum that freezes the body, but with a
little effort, it's
still malleable to pose. Snap. Crackle.
Pop. Creepy.
Bolem is already hard at work looking for
their next donor (I
gather it has to be a certain blood type.)
He takes a sample of Lisolette's blood --
taken from Wahl's handkerchief that she
used after accidentally cutting herself at
the mill earlier, and makes a startling
discovery: Lisolette's blood composition
is so close to Elfie's, that the cure
would be permanent once the transfusion is
done. Good news for the Wahls -- bad news
for Lisolette.
Arnam,
with Lisolette's help, has recovered from
his episode at the mill and considers it
all just a bad dream. He and Raab head to
her apartment but find her gone -- under
mysterious circumstances, according to the
landlady. Arnam spies a picture of
Lisolette and Amilore on the dresser. It's
the girl he saw in Wahl's basement. Raab
tells him who it is -- he and Lisolette
had drawn her hundreds of times. Raab, who
has -- make that had -- a crush on
Amilore, wants to know where he saw her,
and Arnam finally comes clean on
everything that happened to him at the
mill. Raab
isn't quite sold, but feels it's worth
investigating. They first check out the
crypt, and find it open but empty. They
then spot a mannequin poorly hidden in an
alcove. It looks just like Elfie. (Obviously
one of Wahl's sculptures.)
Any
sympathy for Elfie's plight is quickly
lost as she gloats over the hapless
Lisolette, gleefully telling her that
Arnam will be all hers after she's gone.
In the other room, Bolem spouts some
goobledy-gook on how his new super serum,
when combined with Lisolette's blood, will
be a permanent fix. But this permanent fix
has a hefty price tag. For all his years
of service, he wants Elfie for himself
after she's cured.
Meanwhile,
Arnam and Raab sneak into the mill and
promptly trigger the carousel. It wheezes
to life, but when it gets to the last
figure, Raab recognizes the fiery red hair
and tells Arnam to stop the infernal
contraption. Arnam applies the brakes, and
the display comes to such a
screeching halt that the head snaps off the
figure in question, due to the momentum,
and rolls to Raab's feet. He
reluctantly picks it up, but I think he
knows the answer already. It's Amilore.
They hear Lisolette screaming and head
for the basement...
...Where
Wahl is currently wrassling Lisolette's
gag back on (and
we can't help but notice Carrel's exposed
left breast that's bursting out of her
corset. How in the hell did the censors
miss that?) The preparations for
the transfusion are almost complete, but
the two conspirators aren't really
cooperating anymore. In fact, Wahl, none
to happy about Bolem's demands, stabs him
to death: Elfie belongs to him and him
alone.
Meanwhile,
Arnam and Raab break through barricade
after barricade as they slowly make their
way to the basement.
Wahl
hooks up booth girls to the infernal
machine and cranks it up. As it begins to
drain away the bad blood from Elfie, he
looks for the syringe with Bolem's miracle
additive. But it's not on the tray where
it should be, and while
trying to find it, Wahl loses it and
trashes the lab. He grabs Bolem's body,
shakes it, and finally gets his answer. It
was in Bolem's pocket, and it broke open
when he fell on it after Wahl stabbed him
to death. Hearing
Arnam and Raab
getting closer, Wahl sets the lab on fire.
Defeated, he takes up Elfie's body and
slinks away, leaving Lisolette to burn.
But the boys finally manage to get the
last door broken down and rescue her in
the knick of time. Soon, the fire is out
of control and they barely make it outside
to safety. Inside, Wahl carries Elfie up
as high as they can go, but the flames aren't
that far behind them. We cut to
several shots of the carousel burning --
each disintegrating figure revealing what
is hidden underneath. Yuck. And as Wahl
raves and strokes his daughters hair, the flames finally catch up to them.
Outside,
Arnam and Lisolette, embraced in each
others arms, watch solemnly as
the mill burns.
The
End
If
you sit down and think about, has anyone
had more influence on cinema than
mystery/adventure writer Edgar Wallace?
His intricate tales of criminal
masterminds with insane stratagems,
stalwart heroes and damsels in distress
are intertwined in everything from the James
Bond franchise, gialli, slasher
movies, adventure serials and many more. Mill
of the Stone Women
has not one, but two, criminal masterminds
with a stratagem that definitely qualifies
as insane; one --
I really wouldn't call him a stalwart, so
let's say serviceable hero, and since we
have two villains, we have two damsels in
distress -- but only one of them gets
rescued, while the other meets a very
gruesome fate.
Women
was an Italian and French co-production,
set in Holland, using German actors as the
evil scientists (Preiss
would go on to play the equally mad Dr.
Mabuse for Fritz Lang.) The film
was based on a short story of the same
name by writer Pieter Van Weigen,
collected in a book called Flemish
Tales.
Based on Scandinavian folklore, Van
Wiegen's story centered on how the
windmill represented three distinctly
different levels: Heaven, Earth and Hell.
Sure, whatever. That's thinking a little
too deeply, here, though. It also took
four -- count 'em four,
scriptwriters to cook it into a script as
demented as this.
Moving
at a very deliberate pace, it doesn't take
the viewer very long to surmise that all
the missing women are now encased in wax
-- or whatever the hell that is Wahl
injects them with to turn them into
"stone."
The scene where he's posing and prepping
Orfei's body, with the sound of her bones
cracking as he moves her, is the most
disturbing scene in the whole dang film.
So we know the what right away, and then the film takes its own
sweet time showing us the how and the
why.
I'll admit I was encouraging the film to
hurry up in a few spots, but the tedium
doesn't last too long as the film starts
to unravel the mystery, plot wise, right
about the time Arnam cracks up after his
acid trip. After that, the film abruptly
switches gears from overtly
expressionistic Gothicism -- where sex and
death are erotically intertwined -- to full
bore, hold onto your seats, completely-unadulterated
wacko-mad scientist on the loose melodrama,
menacing the damsel while the hero pieces
it all together -- hopefully in time to
save her.
Women
was released the same year as Mario Bava's
seminal Black
Sunday.
And while that was a moody tale of stark
black and white, Women
is in color -- but not really. Let me
explain this the best I can: The colors
are very muted, punctuated with bright
colors scattered around the foreground
drawing the viewer's eye all over the
place. Take
a look at the screen cap of Raab holding
the dismembered head and you'll kind of
see what I'm getting at. It's used to
great effect; dreamlike or nightmare,
depending on the situation, adding to the
films delirium as we can't really focus
our attention on just one place. Due
to some print problems, where all the color
was washed out, and one hideous dub job,
the film slipped into obscurity after it's
initial theatrical run. But it's finally
back in one piece thanks to the fine folks
over at Mondo
Macabro. With a new dub, and -- thank
you jeebus -- optional subtitles, the
restored colors are crisp and clear, so we
can really appreciate what Ferroni was
trying to accomplish, and Mill
of the Stone Women
should take its rightful place of honor as
one the prime examples of the horror film
renaissance of the late '50s and early
'60s.
Roger
Corman's Poe cycle, which also
debuted the same year with House
of Usher,
gets a lot of accolades for its similar
production design, use of color and art
direction --
but
a bigger nod needs to go to scriptwriter
Richard Matheson, production designer
Danny Haller and star Vincent Price. Mill
of the Stone Women
is definitely in the same vein -- only a
lot screwier,
thanks the antics of Dr. Wahl and Bolem.
And that's probably why I like Mill
of the Stone Women
better than Corman's Poe films.
Despite Vincent Price, they're almost too
gothic for their own good. (I
have the same problem with Hammer horror.)
Honestly,
not everything is explained away to my
satisfaction before Wahl's house of
horrors goes up in smoke, but I'm willing
to overlook it. I encourage casual viewers
to stick with it -- at least until the
abrupt 90-degree turn from glacial gothic-romance to manic maniacal mad-science. You
won't be disappointed. It's truly a very,
very strange and weird and wonderful
movie. I don't quite get it, but I likes
the movie. I likes it a lot.
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