Weirdhouse Cinema: Hunchback of the Morgue

2025/1/17

Stuff To Blow Your Mind

AI Deep Dive AI Chapters Transcript

J

Joe McCormick

R

Rob Lamb

Rob Lamb: 我对这部电影的解读是，它讲述了一个为爱可以付出一切，甚至不惜犯罪的驼背人的故事。戈索的悲剧命运，以及他对伊尔莎的爱，是推动剧情发展的核心动力。影片中，他既是令人同情的受害者，也是令人恐惧的凶手，这种矛盾性使得他的形象更加复杂和引人入胜。同时，影片中对社会偏见和人性的探讨也值得关注。 Joe McCormick: 我认为这部电影是对哥特式恐怖元素和经典怪物形象的致敬和颠覆。纳希饰演的戈索，既有传统驼背人形象的影子，也有其独特的个性和魅力。影片中，时间和空间的错乱，以及对疯狂科学的探索，都为故事增添了神秘感和悬念。此外，影片中血腥的暴力场面和特效也值得称道。

Deep Dive

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Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema. This is Rob Lamb. And this is Joe McCormick. And we are once more returning to the Nashiverse. This will be our fourth Paul Nashie film on Weird House Cinema. Paul Nashie, of course, an icon of Spanish horror and just in general, like 1970s

grimy horror cinema. We've previously talked about three of his films. There's 1973's Horror Rises from the Tomb, in which he plays no fewer than three characters, including the undead warlock Alarak de Marnac, alongside his undead bride, played by Helga Linne,

And then we also talked about 1970s Assignment Terror, which is a ridiculous, mostly I would say a spy-themed monster mash featuring Nashie as the cursed werewolf, Voldemar Daninsky. And they had like off-brand versions of all the universal monsters that were being recruited by alien spies to attack Earth. Yes, exactly.

But I have to say some really fun monster combat in that one. I had that one on Blu-ray, donated it to Future Shock Video in New Orleans. So you can rent it there. Yeah.

I recall that one was interesting for how they sketched out the moral character of the different monsters. Like, of course, because it was Paul Nashie playing Waldemar Daninsky as the werewolf. The werewolf was the more sympathetic monster. It's got a, you know, a romantic role. Paul Nashie as this werewolf character, which occurred in many films, often played a kind of tragic romantic role.

But the really bad one was Frankenstein. The Frankenstein monster was like the main henchman of the bad aliens. Yeah, that was interesting. And then we talked about 1981's Night of the Werewolf, a full-blown Waldemar Doninski film in which the legendary werewolf does battle with Lady Bathory, played by Julia Salley.

All three of these were written by Nashie as well, and he directed Night of the Werewolf. I think, did he often write these under, I was going to say a pen name, but I think it was actually his real name, right? Jacinto Molina? Yes, yeah. Generally, they would be credited to his real name. Paul Nashie is his performance name.

Now, in case we're interested in running up the score on recent Nashie viewings, just the other night, my wife and I finished watching another 1971 Paul Nashie movie. We watched The Werewolf vs. The Vampire Woman, which I acquired this past December. It has some really good gopher-style vampire fangs. You know, there are different ways you can design vampire fangs. This made me think about it like the kind that

are actually rather slight, like they kind of hide in the mouth. And then you can have the ones that were, you know, the mouth opens wide and reveals a kind of longer snake fang. And then you've got this style, which is a kind of fang overbite, a sort of chipmunk look where the fangs go down over the bottom lip, which I,

I don't know. I think it looks pretty funny. This is, of course, another tragic, romantic werewolf part for Paul Nash. He's reprising his role as Waldemar Daninsky. I don't know how many movies he played Daninsky and it had to be more than a dozen. He's doing it over and over.

We discussed the full count in our episode on Night of the Werewolf, but it's a whole slew of them. Yeah, so Werewolf vs. the Vampire Woman was a lot of fun, but it's mostly goofball stuff. It has a quite wooden love story. The chemistry between Nashie and his romantic interest is not really there. But it does have a handful of genuinely unnerving and artful sequences. It's kind of interesting...

I don't know what it comes out. So like, it's mostly a B movie, but every now and then there's a shot that could be like, Oh, that's actually quite scary. That could be in a, in a much better film. Yeah. I mean, that's one of the wonderful things about films of this caliber B cinema in general is that,

You know, there's going to be some stuff that, you know, where the either abilities or budget wasn't quite there. But then there'll be areas where it really shines, you know, and it's finding those diamonds in the rough. That's always the joy. Rachel had questions about what the audience was supposed to understand about the romantic appeal of Paul Nashie, because he's sort of part Peter Lorre and part Clark Gable. You know, it's a mix.

Yeah, it is often hard. And in a way, it's interesting because it kind of makes him a bit of a chameleon because he can play a werewolf. He can play...

He can play Dracula. You know, he can play an action hero. And as we're going to discuss today, he can also play a hunchback. Like he, you know, he, as we've mentioned before, like he was a former weightlifter. So, you know, he's a muscular guy. And not, you know, and I think, you know, you can say Paul Nash, he was a handsome fella as well. But he didn't have those kind of necessarily those like iconic,

iconic leading man good looks that were kind of like the standard. And we have, I think, an example of those sorts of good looks for a male actor of the 1970s in Spanish cinema in this picture. Yeah. I think he can be understood as attractive in a way, but it's more the Byronic hero who's maybe not necessarily the most classically handsome, but he has a kind of dark, strong, brooding, complicated, dangerous appeal, which is

goes with his werewolf roles. Yeah, I agree. Because I've watched one or two of the films where he plays like irresistible action Paul Nashie without any supernatural motifs added on. And, you know, it's a little harder to get behind. Yeah. But to the extent that he has Peter Lorre energy, it's like buff Peter Lorre. Yeah. Yeah.

So, yeah, in today's film, Hunchback of the Morgue, we get to experience Nashie as a different horror movie staple, the Hunchback. This trope, of course, has deep roots in gothic horror. Going back to the 1831 Victor Hugo novel, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, with film adaptations of that work going back to 1905, the 1923 silent film adaptation starring Lon Chaney.

stands out, as well as the 1939 talkie starring Charles Lawton and Maureen O'Hara. These have both stood the test of time and are considered classics. The makeup is well in these, too. Like, you look up stills or footage from these films, and it's still very convincing stuff. Now, I think the Hunchback of Notre Dame character has been brought to screen with a number of

different takes but usually the core of the character is that he is someone who is rejected and outcast by others because of his appearance but has a good soul right and there's generally like one female character at least who sees him for who he really is who recognizes the this pure heart within him

So, yeah, a lot of a lot of great actors have played this role over the years. Some of these I've never seen and wasn't familiar with, like Anthony Quinn played Quasimodo in 56. Anthony Hopkins played him in 82 alongside Derek Jacoby, who I believe played the villain in that one. Mandy Patinkin played him in 1997. I vaguely remember that one. I think it was a TV adaptation opposite Salma Hayek and Richard Harris.

We also have the 1996 Walt Disney film adaptation animated. And I'm not sure where the project stands, but there was talk of Idris Elba starring in and directing a Netflix adaptation of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Sadly, I think fate has probably robbed us of our chance to see Big Driss as Quasimodo.

That would have been something. Don't even know if I can imagine it. But sorry, I just had to go over and look at the I had to look up the story because I couldn't remember the name of the villain from The Hunchback of Notre Dame, the archdeacon, the church official. But that was Archdeacon Frollo or Frollo. I don't know how you say it. But yeah, this character, it's funny because I misremembered.

what this character was supposed to be. And thinking back on him, I had been thinking of him more as a, I don't know, a character more like Javert in Les Miserables, another Victor Hugo novel, who is a kind of misguided, overly strict enforcer of the rules, who, you know, kind of fails to see ways in which strict enforcement of the rules can be harmful or, you know, can do more harm than good.

I don't know if that's actually what this character is. It seems like in the novel, at least, he is a weird sort of outsider figure in the church who people think he might be some kind of wizard. He's doing alchemy experiments and he's a lecherous creep, which is funny because that means there's maybe some overlap between that character and one of the main villains in The Hunchback of the Morgue. That's a great point. Yeah. Yeah.

Now, given Paul Nash's love for universal monsters and classic gothic horror, yeah, it was only a matter of time, I guess, until he did a Quasimodo-like character. Though it is important to stress here, this is not another retelling of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Instead, we have a largely original story involving grave robbing, doomed love, mad science, and just a splash of Lovecraftian horror.

Set in the modern world at the time of the film, or is it? Questions about that. This one was temporally confusing. Yes.

Now, you had a great note as well about the likely inspiration for this. I mentioned Nashua was, of course, a big fan of the universal horror movies, all the classics that he grew up on. And you brought up the character of Fritz. Oh, yeah. Well, because this movie to me seemed you could definitely interpret it as Frankenstein, not so much the novel, but the first James Whale movie, the first universal Frankenstein from Fritz's perspective. That's a great point. Yeah. Fritz, of course, being the

hunchback-esque sidekick to the Doctor in the first film. Played by Dwight Frye. Yeah. So, yeah, I could see there's some Fritz DNA to this as well, for sure. And maybe a little Igor in there as well, though. Igor, of course, pure villain. So I guess a real question about this movie is how sympathetic are we supposed to be

Paul Nash's character is because it's clear he's being portrayed at least in the beginning as mostly sympathetic. I mean, the story is basically told from Paul Nash's character's perspective and we're

We see all of his loves and disappointments and humiliations. We identify emotionally with his struggles. We see and other characters repeatedly tell him that despite the fact that he is outcast, he has a good heart and he means well. But we also just see him carry out murder after murder. And not just murder, it's like live, later in the movie, kidnappings of live human subjects to be fed to some kind of monster. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. And in a sense, it's the murders have the sort of standard trajectory of any kind of at least initially sympathetic killer in a film because the initial victims will all be dirtbags. And then later on, you're like, oh, well, they're not really that that much of their straight over into less dirtbag territory. But this film doesn't really make much out of that.

We can observe it and comment on it, but the film doesn't really spend a lot of time with the fact that, yeah, he's increasingly just murdering and kidnapping people to feed them to a monster.

And yet at the same time, I do feel like the movie encourages us to feel sympathy for Gotho, the hunchback, the whole time. So, yeah, it's... And different characters speak about him in ways where it's like, oh, none of this is his fault. And I'm like, I don't know. He's got some responsibility in there. He knows what he's doing. Yeah. So, yeah, we'll discuss as we proceed here.

But as far as elevator pitches go, I would say my elevator pitch would be I would do anything for love up to and including murder and grave robbing. Including after my love is long dead. Yes. All right. Let's hear a little bit of the trailer audio. I'm not sure if we're going to be busting out some English trailer audio or Spanish trailer audio, but either one will give you a taste. You killed my friend. You killed my friend. Killers. Where is he? Where is he?

No, no, no, no, no! Never before has a motion picture told such a story in which love and horror race hand in hand to their final consequences. Never has love been so terrifying. Never has horror been more romantic. Close your eyes tightly if you're unable to look at the terrifying scenes of this motion picture. Interpreted by Paul Naschy, Rosanna Yanni, Vic Winner, Alberto Dalbiz, and Maria Persci.

All right, Rob, speaking of the English and Spanish dubs, I have to report that I had a slightly chaotic viewing experience with this movie because the streaming version that I found to watch, uh, uh, I don't know if I should call out the platform. It was the one that's on the, uh, the shout factory streaming collection. Uh,

Only had one... Maybe this is my fault. Maybe I just didn't figure out how to set it up correctly or something. But at least when I was watching it, I could only figure out how to use one audio option. And that audio option was both the English and Spanish dubs playing simultaneously. Oh, no. Which was somewhat maddening. But I was still able to enjoy the movie. Yeah, that can always be confusing. If you've never, of course, played around with this, you might...

easily make the mistake of thinking, well, the dub and the subtitles are going to be identical, right? No. Very often they are not. Even if they're just a little off, you can feel your brain hemispheres becoming like moving away from each other, your brain splitting in half. Yeah, yeah.

It's like creating the dial tone noise. Yeah. But so I was watching it with both of the audios playing simultaneously and then looking at the English subtitles. So that I'm using when I reference lines in the film, I'm referring to the English subtitles mostly.

I watched this one in Spanish with the English subs. I checked out the English dub at first because it's important to note, especially films from this era, Spanish cinema, they're almost always dubbed, even in Spanish. It was just sort of the standard. It wasn't until later that there was more of a

an emphasis on getting Spanish actors to use their own voices. Yeah. In the sense that a lot of times the movie would not have live sound from the set. Right, right. Even in the language it was shot in, they would do, they would record their lines later. Yeah. And I think maybe part of it too is like, yeah, you bring in a voice actor, they're like, they're better. Anyway, bring them in. But, yeah,

I listened to a little bit of the English dub and I'm like, no, this gotho doesn't sound right. So I just switched to the Spanish version. But I watched it on the Screen Factory released Paul Nashy Collection Volume 2, which is a pretty great Blu-ray set. It contains a number of Paul Nashy films, including The Werewolf and the Yeti, which is really fun. That's another Daninsky film in which he travels to Tibet, I believe.

Uh, so a lot of fun stuff in that. Um, the disc offers two different versions of the Hunchback of the Morgue, regular and uncensored. Uh, I've only watched the uncensored version. Um, I rewatched it and I watched it originally a few years back while I was like deep in COVID. And I think the only difference is like one or two scenes. There's not like a huge difference between the, uh, the, the censored and the uncensored as far as I understand it. But this is a great collection worth, worth checking out. Uh, if you live in Atlanta, you can rent it from Videodrome. Um,

Great quality, great stuff. Few extras as well on the disc. From what I could detect, the uncensored version, there was only really one scene of brief, mild nudity that was on a completely different film quality than the rest of the movie. That stands out. That's the main scene that stands out as being added on. This feels like it was from somewhere else.

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All right. Well, let's get into the people involved here. The director of this picture, and they also have a screenplay credit, so I think they had some influence on the screenplay. It's Javier Aguirre, who lived 1935 through 2019. Spanish film director whose films include a trio of 73 horror pictures,

Hunchback of the Morgue, of course. Another Paul Nash-y film, Dracula's Great Love. And The Killer is one of 13. He worked in multiple genres and was well regarded for his short films. He's one of these directors who I believe did some more experimental short film work early on. The Killer is one of 13. Don't know anything about that one, but it sounds by the title like a jello.

I looked into it briefly when we were, it was like a Friday the 13th episode publication. And I was like, we should do something with 13 in the title. So I was looking into it. It looks like it might be good, but I haven't seen it. If the name of the movie is a complete sentence, there's a good chance it's a Jallo. Yeah. Or if it has something cryptic about like,

the moth with the sapphire plumage or whatever you know there are a number of those that sound like like your auto-generated um jalo title 27 daggers for the owl queen yes

All right. There's also a screenplay credit for Alberto S. Ensua, Date's Unknown, who also worked on Dracula's Great Love and The Killer is One of Thirteen. But the main screenplay credit goes to Paul Nashie, who, of course, also plays our hunchback Wolfgang Gotho.

So, yeah, Paul Nash, the legend himself. We, of course, talked about Paul Nash on the show before. Real name Jacinto Molina Alvarez. He was an aspiring architect turned bodybuilder, turned horror writer, actor and eventually director. He grew up idolizing the universal monsters he saw at the cinema and eventually got to become them.

He worked in various genres in addition to horror, including action, comedy, and history. Though history, I think, with some obvious horror elements as well. But his horror work is what has become legendary and has found an international audience. And clearly, this was his deepest love.

Several of his films certainly explore the darker side of human nature, but his most iconic role, that of the werewolf, Waldemar Daninsky, embodies a clearly heartfelt sense of tragic love and doom. And we see elements of these sensibilities in other roles as well, including this one. And I think that when we're talking about sympathy for Gotho, I think doom is important. Like there is a strong doom vibe to everything here with him. Like,

He is a doomed individual. He's a tragic individual. He stands outside of the laws. He's been pushed outside of society. And therefore, he also has a sort of liberation in being completely untethered from those laws and moral standards.

Yeah. There are even scenes that communicate essentially that idea in the movie. Yeah. But it seems over and over again across his career, Nashie liked to play characters whose love was more powerful than anything in the universe and who in the end are destroyed by their love. Yes. Yeah. So it's always like in the werewolf role, he's always got to get stabbed in the heart with the silver cross by the one woman who truly loves him. Yes. Yeah.

There's a great quote from Nashie that I read in the last Nashie film we covered, Night of the Werewolf, where he's talking about Night of the Werewolf and some of the plot elements. And he says, "...the claustrophobic castle, the gothic tombs, the ill-fated love affair, the menace of the undead, the ostracism of someone who is despised for being different, and the all-pervading shadow of death. All of these elements go to make up my personality and my work."

Sounds about right. Yeah, these characters, these films, like these were the soul of Paul Nashie. So yeah, he, in this film, I have to say, I think he gives a great performance at once sympathetic and menacing or altering between the two, depending on the scene. And his physicality works really well here. He's playing a hunchback, which is, you know, he's hunched over, he's shambling as he moves from scene to scene. And I just have to say, this must have just been physically exhausting for him.

I am not an actor, but I played a character in a video series, a mad scientist talking about science called Anton Jessup. And I had like a slightly hunched over posture for the shoot. And this was just like a few hours on a couple of days. And I just felt like my body was racked after from having to hold like a posture that I wasn't accustomed to. And, you know, it's probably not good posture.

posture at all. And, you know, for someone to play a character like this and shamble about and maintain this kind of posture and gait, yeah, this must have just absolutely wrecked him. Yeah.

I would say you can even see the strain on him in certain scenes. Yeah. All right. Well, let's get into the love interest for old Gotho here. First of all, we have Ilsa. This is this is Gotho's initial doomed crush, played by Maria Elena Apron, born 1948, Spanish actress whose other credits include 69's The House That Screamed.

Armando Diosario's first blinded movie 72's tombs of the blind dead and 1974's the fish with the eyes of gold. Now there's a job title for you. Yeah. Yep. She was also in the 73 Western tequila exclamation point.

And she was only active during the late 60s, early 70s. But she's good. I mean, as far as roles where someone mostly plays a corpse, this was pretty physically demanding. Yeah. I know I already said there are several things that are temporally confusing about the setting of the film. We'll keep coming back to that, especially throughout the plot.

This is set in the modern times. It's set in the 1970s. But this character feels like something out of a Victorian novel. She very much just has a story-based disease that's kind of, oh, I die now. I don't even know which story in particular I'm thinking of. But she feels like a Victorian character. I love that your sample cough there was clearly the cough from Black Sabbath's sweet leaf. Yeah.

You know, my daughter heard that song for the first time the other day and she proclaimed, it's heavy. It is quite heavy. She didn't originate that technology. I had instructed her what heavy means. Awesome.

All right, so this is the initial doomed crush of Gotho. But then Gotho is going to get a new love interest, and that is the character Elke, played by Rosanna Yanni, born 1938. Argentinian-born actress, active from the early 60s to the early 2000s.

She was in Count Dracula's Great Love, same year. She was also in 68's Frankenstein's Bloody Terror. That's another Daninsky picture. And she's also in 1969's Fangs of the Living Dead. That one was directed by D'Osorio, which she also had a production credit on. Oh, and she was in a very interesting looking 1973 Amazonian warrior peplum film that also featured Helga Linne titled War Goddess. And it was directed by Terrence Young.

The guy who directed several of the early James Bond pictures. Oh, OK. That's funny because I can just see her. I'm not saying she was in one, but I could see her in a James Bond movie. She looks like she she would fit right in. And I don't know, in a blackjack scene in a casino.

She's really tall and, of course, gorgeous. But I feel like her height really helps in this picture opposite Gotho because, again, it's Paul Nash. You, I think, is already shorter than her. And then he's stumped. He's stooped over as well. So I don't know, like her very vertical alignment, like makes him even more hunchbacky.

She's good in the role. She plays a doctor, so she has a very caring and therapeutic kind of presence. Her kindness, however, just not in her performance, but the way the character is written, her kindness and level of understanding goes to such lengths that it becomes a kind of hilarious naivety. You know, there's like murder after murder, and she's like, he's really very good. Yes, exactly.

Yeah, there are a lot of characters who see the good in Gotho to the point where they're clearly overlooking a lot of crimes. Yeah. All right, we mentioned that this has a mad scientist in it, and that is the character Dr. Orla, who's a real treat, played by Alberto Dalvis, who lived 1922 through 1983. Yeah, he's our chief antagonist, our mad scientist character.

Argentine film and television actor who worked a lot in horror, giallo, crime, and westerns. Something of a Spanish horror icon himself. And yet this is the only role that he ever had in a Nashie film. He pops up in no fewer than 11 Jess Franco films. So his credits include the likes of 73's The Erotic Rites of Frankenstein. I'm not sure if it's The Monster or The Doctor that has the erotic rights here.

And that's rights like sacred rights, not like legal rights. Satanic rights of Dracula. Yeah, yeah. But he also appeared in the sci-fi action films like 67's Danger! Death Ray and the 72 Telly Savalas film Pancho Villa, which we've talked about on the show before.

He is an interesting and different kind of mad scientist, if you follow me here. So, I don't know, I feel like the mad scientists we see in movies are more often of either the Colin Clive kind of coming apart at the seams, nervous energy variety.

Or they might be more like Dr. Septimus Pretorius in Bride of Frankenstein and be a kind of, oh, I don't know, beyond good and evil libertine of weird obsessions and all that. This guy instead has more of a kind of academic masculine bully energy. He feels like the guy in an academic department who has...

has a kind of charisma and authority and likes to boss other people around and always get his way.

Yeah, I think that's a good read on the character. And it does make him stand out. He has some great villain monologues, but they're not about ruling the universe or anything like that. It's largely about some real scientific advancements are going to come out of this work. So, yeah, I thought Dr. Orlo was a lot of fun here. Yeah, I like him too. I don't know exactly how I got here. He doesn't look...

a whole lot like this guy, but the comparison I kept coming to in my mind is he reminded me of the American actor Richard Thomas who played John Boy on The Waltons and has done a bunch of other roles since then. He was in the adult half of the 1990 It, and he had a role in The Americans, which is a great espionage TV show. If there's a slightly more science-oriented version of that kind of energy, that's what I got from this guy. Yeah.

He has a great, smoldering, hateful glare that put me in the mind of Powers Booth and Michael Shannon. Okay. I can see that, too.

All right, so we have our love interests set in place here. We have our sympathetic monster, and we have our mad scientist. We have a few other parts here to round out the cast. I mentioned that there would be traditional handsome in this picture, and the traditional handsomeness is provided by Victor Barrera, credited as Vic Winner, or Vic Wiener. I think it depends on which trailer you watched exactly how it is pronounced. But he plays Dr. Frederick Tochner.

He is the second author on the forthcoming study that Dr. Orla is working on.

He is. Is he a mad scientist? Not really, but he I don't know. He I think he on one hand is kind of a nice guy who means well, but he also comes across like a chump. He just keeps getting talked into doing bad stuff by Orla. Yeah. Yeah. He's he's here for the applications of this study and is seems willing to turn a blind eye to some of the horrors.

That being said, I feel like his character is really the only decent male character in the film. The vast majority of the men we meet in the picture are belligerent, drunken, hateful bullies. One character is a mad scientist. Then there's Gotho, a tragic figure who murders everyone else. Even the children are just the absolute worst.

Yeah, I guess the only really truly good and pure characters are Ilsa and then Elky. And then I guess you could argue about Tauchner here and then also about Dr. Meyer, his fiance. That's right. Yeah. All the women are fine. But of the men...

only Fred here is decent. Now, Barrera or Winner, he worked in a few different Nashie pictures. We talked about him, I think briefly before because he pops up in Horror Rises from the Tomb. He's also in Count Dracula's Great Love. So yeah, pretty standard stuff here, but you know, he plays his part well. Yeah.

All right. We mentioned Dr. Meyer, Dr. Maria Meyer. This is Dr. Fred's fiancee, played by Maria Pershi, who lived 1938 through 2004. Pershi here was an Austrian-born actress whose biggest film was likely 1964's Man's Favorite Sport. She was billed third in that film. It starred Rock Hudson and was directed by none other than Howard Hawks in his fourth to last film.

She appeared in five films with Paul Nash. She was also in the third blind dead picture, The Ghost Galleon. Now, a brief note on special effects, because I have to say, I thought the gore in this movie looks pretty good. Like it's really fun. Blood and slime. Yes. You know, I'm not primarily a gore hound by nature. It's not the first thing I'm looking for in a movie, but I but I do appreciate better gore. And this is better gore than much. Yeah. Some good disembodied heads in this picture, for example.

The special effects credit goes to one Pablo Perez, a Spanish effects artist who also worked on such films as 72's Horror Express, which we previously talked about and had some very fun effects in it. Yeah, past October. Yeah, yeah. Count Dracula's Great Love, Lucio Fulci's 1973 White Fang adaptation. Yeah.

What? I didn't even know that existed. As well as 73's The Vampire's Night Orgy, a movie I haven't seen, but it's on my radar because there's a scene in the picture and it's featured on promotional materials, including the poster that shows Helga Linne as a vampire carrying a male victim, which is a nice inversion of the horror movie poster trope in which a male monster carries a female captive.

So the movie may just be absolute trash. It may not be good. I don't know. But bravo for doing the gender flip on this iconic bit of poster sleeves. I love it. Yeah. And it looks good. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think she's really carrying him here. Yeah. I mean, they've posed him just right, showing off the thighs and all that. Yeah. Yeah.

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John Stewart is back at The Daily Show, and he's bringing his signature wit and insight straight to your ears with The Daily Show Ears Edition Podcast. Dive into John's unique take on the biggest topics in politics, entertainment, sports, and more. Joined by the sharp voices of the show's correspondents and contributors. And with extended interviews and exclusive weekly headline roundups, this podcast gives you content you won't find anywhere else.

Ready to laugh and stay informed? Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Do you want to understand an invisible force that's shaping your life? I'm Osvald Ossian, one of the new hosts of the long-running podcast Tech Stuff. I'm slightly skeptical, but obsessively intrigued. And I'm Cara Price, the other new host. And I'm ready to adopt early and often.

On Tech Stuff, we travel all the way from the mines of Congo to the surface of Mars to the dark corners of TikTok to ask and attempt to answer burning questions about technology. One of the kind of tricks for surviving Mars is to live there long enough so that people evolve into Martians. Like data is a very rough proxy for a complex reality. How is it possible that

the world's new energy revolution can be based in this place where there's no electricity at night. Oz and I will cut through the noise to bring you the best conversations and deep dives that will help you understand how tech is changing our world and what you need to know to survive the singularity.

So join us. Listen to Tech Stuff on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Ever wonder what it's like to be on the phone with an NFL general manager as you finalize the biggest contract in NFL history? I'm AJ Stevens, Vice President of Client Strategy at Athletes First, where we've negotiated $1.4 billion in current NFL quarterback contracts.

Introducing the Athletes First Family Podcast, the quarterback series. Along with my co-host Brian Murphy, Athletes First CEO, we're pulling back the curtain on how these historic deals come together. You'll hear directly from the agents who shaped the NFL's financial landscape. The ones who negotiated Justin Herbert's extension and Deshaun Watson's fully guaranteed contract that sent shockwaves through the league. This isn't just about the numbers, though.

It's about the untold stories behind these massive negotiations and the relationships the NFL superstars like Dak Prescott, Tua Tungvaluwa, and Jordan Love have with their agents at Athletes First. For the first time ever, the agents who orchestrate these deals are sharing the details of the negotiations and everything that led up to their clients signing on the dotted line. Listen to the Athletes First Family Podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. ♪

And then finally, the music here is by Carmelo A. Barneola, who lived 1929 through 2002, highly influential Spanish composer who also worked in film and TV scores. He won some Spanish film awards for a few different pictures, including 74's Tormento. His other scores include The House Without Frontiers and

and Cutthroat 9 in 72, and three Nashie films from 73, Hunchback, Count Dracula's Great Love, and Horror Rises from the Tomb. I would say good melodramatic score on the whole.

Yeah, I would agree with that, though. I will say it's not that the music is bad, especially early in the film. There is a lot of use of music that is really not my favorite style, but it's not the music's fault. It's just that there's a lot of like, I don't know, marches with heavy horns and Oktoberfest style music.

Uh, that's, I don't know. I get that. That's some people's thing. They, they lean heavily on the score right as the movie opens to let you know that this is Germany or it's Germanic or it's, uh, it's Austria. It's somewhere, uh, it's somewhere that has Oktoberfest, uh,

And then later on in some scenes, we see like Oktoberfest posters on the walls and so forth. Yeah. Yeah. So, well, speaking of that, should we jump right into the plot? Yeah. Let's hit the polka music. So, yeah, this is the music we're getting while we see the credits play. It's not exactly it's not polka music. I think this might technically be a march of some kind. I don't know the music term, but it's.

It's a lot of horns. It's like blasting. It's really loud on the soundtrack, like going into the red. And, you know, yeah, the Oktoberfest zone. But this is playing while the camera pans over the beautiful landscape of wherever this is. I think it's supposed to be Germany. There are mountains in the distance, hills in the foreground, covered in forests. The leaves are going orange for the autumn. And then we see green, clear expanses of farmland. So it's a very beautiful landscape.

Yeah, yeah. Most of this film was filmed in Spain, but there are some shots from Austria. And I think some of these zoom in on the town shots are definitely Austrian. Oh, yeah. Maybe it's supposed to be Austria, but it feels like one of those feels like Germany or Austria or something. Anyway, we zoom in on one sleepy town somewhere in these hills. Now, here I want to come back to the issue of.

how someone could easily be confused about when this movie is supposed to take place because some of the sets and plot elements really imply this is supposed to take place in the 19th century or even earlier but that can't be because there are contemporary cars and some of the characters but not others are wearing 1970s clothes so this has to be set in the 1970s but again we will

Just see things here and there, like some interior decoration, some clothes and things like that, that make it seem like it's from another time. And I don't know what contributed to that weird anachronism, but there it is. Yeah, I mean, some of it probably has to do with the locations and the sets where on one hand you'll have mad science equipment.

But then on the other hand, you have these tremendous ruins and stone hallways with straw strewn on the ground. So, yeah, some temporal confusion does ensue. Yeah. So in this town, we see an empty street. It is empty, except for Paul Nashy, who is...

wandering along the cobblestones in his hunchback costume. And this is our protagonist, Gotho. I'm going to call him Gotho because that's how it's spelled. I think when I was hearing the characters say it, this might have been more in the Spanish dub. They were calling him more like Goto, but I think Gotho is easier for me to remember to say.

So Gotho makes his way toward, I think this place would be called a beer hall in the cultural context. It is a drinking establishment with tables and chairs. It's got an accordion player and it serves beer in comical, almost gallon-sized glasses.

And inside we meet several bar patrons. There is a young, foppish man with shaggy brown hair wearing an olive green sweater. This might be a commando sweater. I'm not sure. But he's carousing with two women, also in temporally confusing outfits. They're dressed like barmaids, like the St. Pauli girl. Mm-hmm.

And this guy is named Udo, and he's just partying with these ladies. They're like swaying back and forth wildly, drunkenly to the accordion music, laughing at nothing. They're just clinking their mugs together about, again, apparently nothing. And then this guy, Udo, rudely yells at the accordion player to play something different. He says they're getting bored.

The accordion player stops, plays a different song, which sounds exactly like the first song. And then Paul Nashie watches this scene play out. So he's peeking in through the beer hall window. At a table nearby, there are a couple of other young louts. Somebody says that they are students and they challenge Udo to a drinking contest by saying, this was the line, can you handle your beer as well as it can handle your girls? Yeah.

So they order four huge beers, just gigantic beers. These beers are so huge. The glasses are so huge and the quantity of beer is so huge that like you almost feel like the humans are shrinking.

Yes.

And I'm not a beer drinker, so it just seems like, wouldn't it just become so warm by the time you get to the bottom of that glass? Well, not if you drink it like Udo and this other guy, because they just chug it all at once. So they have a drinking contest. Udo goes toe-to-toe with one of the students, a tall guy with sideburns. And I...

I would say this bar scene is good to watch if you want to convince yourself to quit drinking alcohol. It makes alcohol look absolutely revolting. These two guys, they're drinking the giant beers. They're drooling everywhere. They're spitting little flecks of froth. They end up with their faces and clothes covered in some kind of gleaming mucus from the chugging process. So they're not just wet. You know, they've got drooling.

Yeah.

Because after you're done drinking at this place, you're just like, I have to leave now and fall in the street. Yeah, that's right. So Udo wins the drinking contest because Kid Sideburns here falls unconscious and then smashes his beer stein on the floor. Udo mocks him and then announces, soaking wet, that it's time he has to go home.

The ladies dressed up like the St. Polly girl are they're like, no, Udo, don't go. I think the implication is that Udo is the life of the party is very handsome and charismatic and they want him to stay and party.

But, you know, how's he going to stay in party? He's like soaked in beer. So he gets up. He wanders outside by himself, stumbling and staggering back and forth as he makes his way down the street. Now, from the shadows nearby, Gotho watches Udo leave and then follows him at a distance looking concerned. At some point while he's going down the street, Udo drops something. I think it's his wallet. And Gotho sees this and runs to pick it up. He calls out, Udo, you dropped this.

But Udo does not appreciate Gotho's help. Instead, he hits Gotho and then he says like, Gotho, you monster. What were you going to do? Rob me? One direct quote from this part from the subtitles is he says to Gotho, your fart face turns my guts. Yeah.

But in this altercation, Udo drops a photograph of a woman signed with a note. Gotho picks it up and it says, to Udo, with all my love, Ilsa. And Gotho reads this to himself, clearly in pain, reading it. It's just, it's wounding him emotionally. Mm-hmm.

Meanwhile, Udo is walking on ahead, but suddenly he starts coughing and gagging and clutching his stomach, and he just collapses on the street and apparently dies. I was confused about this, but I don't know. We can check in on this in a minute. First, we have to say we go to a second location that we're told in a subtitle is Feldkirch Hospital or Feldkirch. It's spelled F-E-L-D-K-I-R-C-H Hospital.

And so it's a clinic situated up on a slope overlooking the town. It's surrounded by elegant, well-kept gardens and a fountain courtyard. And tonight the rain is pouring. We see the rain pouring into the fountain outside. But suddenly we are in the morgue of the hospital.

It's a room with white tile walls, lockers for body storage and autopsy tables. And here we see Udo laid out, I think already dead on one of the tables. And then Goto is here wearing a heavy leather apron. He approaches Udo's body with a knife in hand, grinning. And Goto says, now, Udo, your skin is pale white. You no longer have that handsome olive complexion the women like so much.

You were so proud of your good looks. You made fun of the hump on my back. You never realized you would end up as a pile of meat at the hands of bungling students."

Then Gotho takes the knife and proceeds to, I think it's not exactly clear what all happens here, but I think he cuts off Udo's head, hands and feet and puts them in a bag in his cart. While he's doing this, he's singing song lyrics to himself that go, the dead will never rise again. The crows, they sing and sing.

So it's a little ambiguous what happened here. Like, how did Udo die? Was he already dead when the cutting happened? I think. I assume. Yeah. I mean, because he's in the morgue. My understanding is he just straight up like died of alcohol poisoning in the street. He drank so much beer that he died in the middle of the street. Yeah.

Anyway, Gotho, after this, he takes his little cart, presumably full of Udo's organs, like his head and his hands and stuff, and he wheels it out of the morgue, going past a couple of doctors who work in the morgue. And these guys stink. As Gotho's coming in, they're in the middle of some misogynist knee slapper, and they stop Gotho to insult him and yell at him. They call him a gorilla. They tell him he's not welcome in the dissection room.

One of them says, you know that the students have a special dislike for your baboon face. So what's worse here, baboon face or fart face? We've already gotten both. But I do want to emphasize here, many times characters comment on the ugliness of Gotho's face, but he doesn't have any special makeup. Really, he has a scar, but that's about it. Otherwise, it's just Paul Nashy face. Yeah. So on one hand, it is always a little...

jarring where you're like, he doesn't look that ugly, guys. He just looks like Paul Nashy. But on the other hand, I guess it's kind of nice that it makes the performance pure Nashy. You know, like there's no potentially distracting makeup getting between you and the performance. Yeah.

So anyway, Gotho goes about his business. I don't know what he's doing with this, this, uh, with the Udo organs, but he, at one point he stops in a hallway to gaze longingly at the photograph of Ilsa that Udo dropped. And it's obvious that Gotho is in love with Ilsa, whoever she is. She's single now. Yeah, that's true. So we're about to meet her.

You see, Ilsa is actually a patient at this hospital where Gotha works. They have a and they have a relationship, not a romantic one, but a friendship. Ilsa is here with a very Victorian movie disease. It causes her to appear pale and go into fits of weak, dry coughing.

When we meet her, the doctor tells her she's going to be fine. But then after they leave the room, Gotho hears the doctor and the nurse talking about how she actually has no chance whatsoever. And the doctor says her lungs are practically destroyed. I feel like they're barely out of earshot when they say that. Yeah. Yeah.

So Gotho comes into the room to visit Ilsa and brings her flowers that he picked from the gardens outside. And Ilsa is obviously glad to see him. She thanks him for the flowers. And they talk about a number of things. They talk about the death of her boyfriend, Udo. Gotho tells her not to cry because Udo died dreaming of her. I mean, this does raise questions like why?

Does it make sense to you that Ilsa and Udo are an item? I know, listeners, you haven't gotten to know Ilsa all that well yet, but Ilsa is going to be presented as just an angel on Earth, a kind of impossibly pure, kind, and perfect soul. And Udo, in the short time we get to know him, is presented as just overtly vain, stupid, hostile, and violent. Yeah.

Yeah, I agree. But the only read I have on it that makes sense is, well, we only got to see Udo at his absolute worst. Like maybe he's just drinking really heavily right now because he knows that his girlfriend is dying. And so, yeah, we caught him at his worst being drunk and belligerent and hateful in the street. And maybe he has other qualities we're just not privy to. Yeah, I don't know. I guess they do say he's very handsome. That's the one redeeming quality we know about.

So Gotho promises to bring Ilsa flowers every day. She tells him that he's the only one who visits her, the only one who cares. It seems Ilsa's family have all died and she has no one else. So Gotho's her only friend.

She asks Gotho to describe the countryside while she closes her eyes. She wants to sort of, you know, do some mental travel with Gotho narrating for her. And she seems to know that she's going to die, even though the doctors told her otherwise. Ilsa kind of knows everything. She's a little mild omniscience.

This is, of course, the first scene in which we see Gotho entering a room with flowers. And I love every sequence that he does this because there's generally this just look of complete optimism as walking into a terrible situation. He somehow...

thinks everything is going to be okay. And yeah, I love it. I want to make Valentine cards this year with images of Gotho holding flowers. He makes a very, very adorable face. It's almost I made you a cookie, but I ate it at levels. Yeah.

Hey, everybody. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is sponsored by Capital One. In my house, we subscribe to everything, music, TV, even cat food. And it rocks until you have to manage it all, which is where Capital One comes in. Capital One credit card holders can easily track, block, or cancel recurring charges right from the Capital One mobile app at no additional cost.

With one sign-in, you can manage all your subscriptions, all in one place. Learn more at CapitalOne.com slash subscriptions. Terms and conditions apply. Jon Stewart is back at The Daily Show, and he's bringing his signature wit and insight straight to your ears with The Daily Show Ears Edition podcast. Dive into Jon's unique take on the biggest topics in politics, entertainment, sports, and more. Joined by the sharp voices of the show's correspondents and contributors, Jon Stewart.

And with extended interviews and exclusive weekly headline roundups, this podcast gives you content you won't find anywhere else. Ready to laugh and stay informed? Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Do you want to understand an invisible force that's shaping your life?

I'm Osvald Ossian, one of the new hosts of the long-running podcast Tech Stuff. I'm slightly skeptical, but obsessively intrigued. And I'm Cara Price, the other new host. And I'm ready to adopt early and often.

On Tech Stuff, we travel all the way from the mines of Congo to the surface of Mars to the dark corners of TikTok to ask and attempt to answer burning questions about technology. One of the kind of tricks for surviving Mars is to live there long enough so that people evolve into Martians. Like data is a very rough proxy for a complex reality. How is it possible that

the world's new energy revolution can be based in this place where there's no electricity at night. Oz and I will cut through the noise to bring you the best conversations and deep dives that will help you understand how tech is changing our world and what you need to know to survive the singularity.

So join us. Listen to Tech Stuff on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Ever wonder what it's like to be on the phone with an NFL general manager as you finalize the biggest contract in NFL history? I'm AJ Stevens, Vice President of Client Strategy at Athletes First, where we've negotiated $1.4 billion in current NFL quarterback contracts.

Introducing the Athletes First Family Podcast, the quarterback series. Along with my co-host Brian Murphy, Athletes First CEO, we're pulling back the curtain on how these historic deals come together. You'll hear directly from the agents who shaped the NFL's financial landscape. The ones who negotiated Justin Herbert's extension and Deshaun Watson's fully guaranteed contract that sent shockwaves through the league. This isn't just about the numbers, though.

It's about the untold stories behind these massive negotiations and the relationships the NFL superstars like Dak Prescott, Tua Tungvaluwa, and Jordan Love have with their agents at Athletes First. For the first time ever, the agents who orchestrate these deals are sharing the details of the negotiations and everything that led up to their clients signing on the dotted line. Listen to the Athletes First Family Podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

So after this, there's a scene where Gotho is wandering the streets of the town, melancholy, I think, because of Ilsa's health. And there are schoolchildren who appear to taunt him. They call him a dirty monkey and he shakes his fist at them. And then the kids pelt him with rocks, like hitting him in the head and causing him to bleed. And then they all run away. Evil children. Yeah, like they basically stone him in the streets. Yeah.

And this reminded me, there's a scene in 73's Return of the Blind Dead, same year in which children pelt Murdo, the outcast character in that film with rocks. I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. So I don't know if these films were both riffing on the same reference point. But at any rate, there was a lot of kids throwing rocks at outcasts in 1973. Yeah.

Well, anyway, immediately after this, Gotho is helped to his feet by a woman who seems to appear out of nowhere, a tall, elegant woman. She's blotting his wounds with a handkerchief. This woman tells Gotho to come with her for treatment because she is a doctor. And we will learn that this is Elky.

So they go on a walk to Elky's house and she and Gotho get to know each other. She hears the story of Gotho's history with Ilsa. They were friends as children. She played with him, even though the other children said he was ugly and frightening.

Then later, he found out that she was ill in the hospital and he began to visit her every day. And Elky infers from listening to all this that Gotho is in love with her. But he asks her and Gotho says he doesn't know. He doesn't know whether he's in love with her. He just knows that he does care for her and he wants her to be well. So they go to Elky's home and she treats his wounds and he thanks her. In fact, he doesn't just thank her. He bows down on the floor and kisses her feet. Yeah.

And I was like, man, it's good to show appreciation. That's a little too thankful, buddy. You need to dial it back just a little bit. I don't know. It might be appropriate in some other cultural context. To hear it, it reads a little much. Yeah, I think Gotho has no sense of proportion. But also, I just wanted to linger here for a second because, Rob, I had to take a...

Photo of the screen. Did you stop to get a good look at this room in Elky's house? What is going on here? There's a random hand railing in the middle of the room, not apparently attached to any stairs or anything. There's a green treasure chest there.

Very busy floral print upholstery on the furniture. A golden, highly decorated, almost Buddhist temple-style archway over the exit from the living room. There are animal pelts and a crossbow hanging on the wall. And then, here's the real topper.

Two severed human hands on a table in the foreground. This is so easy to miss. I did not even catch it the first time I saw this scene. But then the second time I was like, wait, what? What? And we get no explanation at all.

Yeah, I did not notice these hands in either of my viewings. So maybe these are supposed to be anatomical models. Why are they bloody then? Why do they have bloody stumps? I don't know. My other read is that maybe this was Nash's home or apartment at the time. Like, that would make more sense with the pelt and the crossbow. Oh, I mean, it was shot there. Because I think this is supposed to be Elkie's home in the movie. It is. It's supposed to be Elkie's home. But I'm just wondering, like, yeah, did they build this? Did they put all these...

odd things together or is just just this is just like a snapshot of someone's home maybe Paul Nash's home I don't know I could believe this was Paul Nash's home in real life

But yeah, why the severed hands? I mean, she is a doctor, but would it be normal for doctors to have severed hands in their houses? Yeah, I mean, you at least keep those in the fridge, right? So next scene, Gotho is taking Ilsa for a walk around the pleasant little gardens outside the hospital. She's in a wheelchair. He's pushing her and she's talking about how she knows her life is fading.

But Ilsa says she likes to look at the roses in the garden. So these visits where Gotho pushes her around to look at the flowers, they're really helping her feel better. And then when she says this, Gotho cuts one of the roses from the garden and brings it to her. And she says, we can't do that. Cutting the flowers is forbidden. And then Gotho has a great line. Yeah, he says, it's OK. Everything is forbidden for me.

And yeah, obviously it speaks to Gotho's outsider status, but it also helps us understand why Gotho does the other things that he does, i.e. the murders and the dismemberments and the grave robbing. He's been pushed outside of society and therefore its rules no longer apply to him. So he still has this deep down a heart of gold, but he has already been pushed over the line in terms of society's laws and norms.

Yeah, yeah, that's right. So Ilsa says, these roses are my last happiness. If only I could have a bouquet every day. And then Gotho promises her, he says, you'll have them. And then from this sweet scene, the sweet, sad scene, we cut straight to something else. Now we're told we're in the Feldkirch Women's Reformatory. So it seems this is some kind of...

mental hospital for women. And the first thing we see is a couple of women in a dormitory room here engaging in what seems to be recreational whipping of each other with a leather strap. Yeah, just spankings all around here in a scene that really feels like it was just here to spice up a grindhouse trailer or lead to more exploitive content regarding these two characters. But it really doesn't.

It's just, we get this one moment. Yeah. Really doesn't go. We don't see any more of this. We do see these characters later in the movie when, uh, when there's a creature that needs to eat human flesh, but that's it. Yeah. They show up later as victims, but that's about it. Yeah. Anyway, so this is going on and suddenly Elky comes in the door and she's like, what?

what is the meaning of this and takes the strap out of the patient's hand. And she's like, okay, we're going to, you know, you know what this means. We're going to have to separate you two. And I'm telling Dr. Meyer. So apparently Elky is a doctor here, but I think not the head doctor. I think she's working for Dr. Meyer.

So we cut from there to meet Dr. Meyer. In fact, we're going to meet a couple of major characters, Dr. Meyer and Dr. Tauchner. We learned that they are engaged to be married. So they're a couple and they're both professionals here at the hospital, but they're also kind of scheming. They're talking about

some secret research that Tauchner is involved in, which they don't want the trustees of the university to find out about. And this is the research of Dr. Orla, a character we haven't met yet. But when Elke comes in, Dr. Meyer, I think she says something like, Oh, Elke, this is my fiance, Dr. Tauchner. You,

You may remember him because he was your mentor in school. And then she explains that Elke has a talent for criminal psychiatry. So after this, there's a scene, another scene of Gotho in the garden. But this turns into a fight scene. He's not here with Ilsa this time.

Instead, she's in her room and he's out here cutting roses from the garden to take to Ilsa. And then a bunch of the hooligan medical students come out and just start harassing him and insulting him. One of these guys is Kid Sideburns from the bar in the opening scene. And they're mocking him. They're saying, you are the prince of monkeys. You are ugly and so forth. And Gotho, I think he's used to this. But then things really escalate when the dude insults Ilsa. Yeah.

He says something like, I hope your, I wrote this down. He says, I hope your princess can become impregnated by the fragrance of roses. Something was lost in translation there, I guess. Yeah.

Well, whatever it means, it's clearly supposed to be insulting to her and him. And this sends Gotho over the edge and he attacks. He's like choking the med student. And the fight turns into a four on one against Gotho and he gets badly beaten. They kick him on the ground until Tauchner and another doctor arrive to stop it.

But Gotho puts up a good fight, and there's an absolutely beautiful moment in this fight where Gotho pushes one of the hooligans into a bush, and the hooligan bounces off of said bush like it's a wrestling ring rope right back into a kind of back body drop from Gotho. And I was like, oh, man, that's inspired. Mm.

The next scene, Gotho, I guess he goes straight from here to Ilsa's room. But oh, Ilsa is dying. She's talking to the nurse here about Gotho bringing her beautiful flowers and then she dies. And then Gotho gets there right after she dies. And the nurse tells him she's like, oh, she died too bad you were outside getting wailed on or you would have been here for it.

Yeah. So these heartbreaking scenes of Gotho arriving too late for Ilsa, and it'll happen again. These are too much. And also just morbidly hilarious. Again, entering the room with those flowers, all the optimism in the world, and all the

only to be greeted with like worse and worse news. Yeah. So Gotho is left alone with Ilsa's body here, and he is first overwhelmed with grief, and then you can see with rage. I think he's angry at the students who were attacking him because they robbed him of this moment with Ilsa.

So from here we go to the next scene, which is that later that night, Gotho is waiting alone in the morgue and the two dissection specialists wheel Ilsa in on a cart and.

And they're like, hey, Goto, here's your one true love. We just wanted to make you aware that we're immediately going to rob and desecrate her corpse. So they're going to steal the gold crucifix from her neck. They're saying they can sell it and buy themselves a round of drinks. And Goto freaks out and attacks them. In fact, he doesn't just attack them. He starts beating them. But then he grabs and—

axe and why is there an axe in the morgue but he grabs an axe and he decapitates one guy and disembowels the other the decapitation is single stroke with what looks like a fire axe yeah this sequence is just amazing just an absolute bloodbath of a scene and the gore effects hit all the right 1970s horror notes you know what I'm saying like there's just a certain way the blood looks the way the bodies come apart here absolutely perfect

So Gotho grabs his flower bouquet and he quickly wheels Ilsa out of the morgue. He's going to take her to his secret hideaway. So what is this place? It's a place we have not seen in the movie yet. It is some kind of dungeon or passageways. I think maybe better to call it catacombs. It's just like lots of these passageways and rooms underneath the hospital grounds, which Gotho accesses by way of a hatch under a garden path.

So he lowers Ilsa's body inside on a rope and then descends himself. And he lays her body out on a large table or slab, which is covered in cobwebs, chains, rags, and bones, which he awkwardly has to push away. And...

I don't know. At first I was like, what is this place? It's got skeletons all along the walls. They're dressed in robes and hoods. Some are in coffins. There are just racks of weapons and torture instruments. And there are torches already burning in here. So somebody must regularly use this place. I think since Gotha is the only character we meet who knows about it, it must sort of be Gotha's residence.

Yeah, I think he puts out fresh straw on the ground and he lights all these torches. Yeah. So Gotho tells Ilsa that she must rest now and he will find a way to take care of her. But first, he says, he has some business to take care of. He says, I have to deliver a bouquet of roses to one who doubted your beauty.

I love Gotho's outfit here as well. It's kind of like a black poncho, but also kind of like, it's kind of like, I guess, like a morgue, a mortician smock or something. Yeah, yeah. So we're going to go back to the disgusting beer hall. I don't think I mentioned this the first time. Another unpleasant thing about this place is the lighting. This is a bar with off-white walls that is extremely well lit inside. Just imagine that for a second for a bar environment. The ambiance is bad.

Yeah, like every sticky surface is gleaming. Most likely you can see every dead insect in this place. It's gross. So all of the med students who beat Gotho up earlier here, they're getting beard up. They're being loud and rude to servers here.

And then we do see one server here who I think was one of the barmaids who was partying with Udo in the earlier scene. She's in the middle of bringing beer to these creeps when she looks out the window and sees Paul Nashy and she just starts shrieking at seeing Paul Nashy's face. Again, it's just Paul Nashy with the scar. He doesn't look scary. It's just a guy looking in the window.

But she screams. The med students turn and look, but by then Paul Nash is gone. So they tell her she's hallucinating and they demand more beer. And then the sideburns guy who was leading the mockery earlier, he's once again disgustingly drunk and just glazed with some kind of beer drool. He announces that he has to go home.

We learn that his name is Hans and he stumbles out and they say, be careful, Hans, don't bump into the devil on your way home. And just like in the earlier scene, we watch Hans go down the street and we watch Goto follow him at a distance. Eventually Hans makes it back home, Goto sneaks in and then murders Hans in his bed by cramming a bouquet of roses into his mouth.

And Gotha says, experience the aroma because it will be the last smell of your life. It's this this murder is less impressive, but it's you know, the the gimmick is nice. He kills them with the flowers that he was bringing to Elsa. So fair enough. Now we're going to check in with some police investigators who I think ultimately don't play that big of a role in the plot. But.

There's a mustache guy and then a guy who looks like he could be a bishop of some kind, but he's just a police inspector in a suit. And they're talking about the crime scene in the morgue. One of them says, you couldn't imagine it. It was terrible. The two cadavers were absolutely destroyed. And they discuss how Gotho, the clerk in charge of the morgue, has disappeared. But they rule him out as a suspect because their inquiry has revealed that he is harmless and passive. Yeah.

And I was just thinking, wait, did anybody ever follow up on the issue of Udo's body getting chopped into pieces on Gotho's watch? Yeah, no clue. Maybe that one got kind of like swept under the rug, you know? Yeah, maybe. I don't know. But then the inspectors discuss how Ilsa's body has also disappeared. And they say, once again, their inquiry has revealed that Gotho was in love with Ilsa. Where are they getting all this information? Yeah.

Also, this is literally supposed to be the same night. This is all the same night. So the murder has must have just happened within the past few hours and they're here talking about it and they already know all this stuff about Gothel enough to rule him out. And do they know about Hans yet?

Oh, they're just about to find out. So the cops find out about a second crime. This is the murder of Hans with the sideburns RIP. And then they, they find out, wait, no, they already know this also. So they've got all this information. They're like, Oh, this guy was fighting with Gotho earlier today. So it's gotta be Gotho. We got to put out an APB, even though we ruled them out. Okay. Finally enough evidence has accumulated later that night.

Go, though, comes home to the dungeon to find, oh, there are rats swarming all over Ilsa's body, taking bites out of her. And then he has to fight them off with fire. And this scene is a bummer because of, well, Rob, you can talk about it. We know apparently there was some animal cruelty on the set in the shooting of this scene. Yeah, it's unfortunate. But this film does entail scenes of live rats on fire capping off what sounds like a series of bad production decisions.

They apparently set fire to some of the actual sewer rats that were captured for use in these scenes, including the scenes where they attack Nashie, who had to get a bunch of shots beforehand to keep from getting sewer rat diseases.

However, I've read that the rats we see on the corpse here of Ilsa are actually guinea pigs that were dyed brown. I didn't really have the stomach to really analyze these sequences, but this is what I have read. This is not our first film with flaming rats in it. Would that it was our last.

Nash, he would later express regret that they filmed the scenes this way, but at the time, it was just presented as the way you did things. So we talked about this before, you know, on pictures. Unfortunately, you do see this sort of thing turn up in pictures from prior decades. And some of it's not as visible. Like, there are a number of things that are now considered animal cruelty regarding horse stunts, for example, that not being a horse person myself, I tend to not even notice. So I don't know how many times I've seen that.

horse cruelty without just having the expertise to recognize it. That being said, with this film, there's no doubting what's going on here. These are clearly live rats on fire. Yeah. Now, if not for knowing about the animal cruelty, there would be some pretty funny things about this scene because it has rats like leaping at Gotho from the floor, like as if they're just jumping right off the ground onto his neck to attack him. Obviously, it's people throwing either rats or fake rats. Mm-hmm.

But plot wise, Gotho is like, wow, I guess I shouldn't have left her in the rat room. So he relocates her to another room, which is now the second room is full of torture equipment. It's got a rack. I think I see an iron maiden and he like puts her on the rack table. I mean, he doesn't stretch her, but it's just that's her resting place now.