THE SHE BEAST (1966)

In present-day Transylvania, an apparently drunk older guy stumbles into a grotto where he has taken up residence and reads from a book by Count Von Helsing. In flashback, we see what he reads about, an incident from two hundred years ago in which a grotesquely disfigured old woman named Vardella, accused of being a witch and being responsible for a child's death, is tied onto a chair at the end of a huge contraption. She is speared from behind with a huge spike and is lowered in and out of a lake until she's dead. In her dying throes, she curses the villagers and vows to return to get vengeance. Back in the present, we discover that the old man reading the book is Von Helsing himself, now something of a local eccentric. He heads to an inn run by Ladislaw Groper where he makes the acquaintance of a honeymooning British couple, Philip and Veronica. He tells them the story of Vardella, but they are more concerned with the strange behavior of the obnoxious and practically drooling Groper. That night, Groper spies on them from outside as they make love and Philip beats him up. Groper then screws up their car so the next morning as they leave the village, the steering system breaks down and they wind up at the very lake where Vardella was drowned. They are taken to town where Philip wakes up unharmed but discovers that the long-dead but now alive Vardella was found in the car instead of Veronica. Von Helsing tells Philip that he can exorcise the witch and bring Veronica back. Meanwhile, Vardella kills a handful of folks (including the reprehensible Groper who attempts to rape his young niece) before Philip and Von Helsing can get Vardella back to the lake and perform the exorcism, and Vardella becomes Veronica—or has she?

You can go to the internet to read about the brief career of young director Michael Reeves who made the classic WITCHFINDER GENERAL in 1968 then died of a drug overdose at the age of 25. This was his first film (of only three) and it's basically a traditional witch revenge story with clumps of would-be political satire (concerning the Communists who ruled Transylvania at the time) and some oddly placed comic relief. The awful Groper is played by Mel Welles for queasy laughs, even during the sex assault scene, and Welles fails utterly in making anything of the character. Horror movie legend Barbara Steele is fine as Veronica—Reeves only had her for a few days, so she has limited on-screen time. Ian Ogilvy (pictured with Steele) can't quite find a way to make Philip sympathetic or even particularly likable, though he's not really unlikable either. John Karlsen plays Von Helsing mostly for laughs but he's not very funny, just kind of sad and depressing. Actually, the whole thing is a bit depressing, like they all got together to make a movie and realized partway in that it wasn't working, but had to finish. A long slapstick car chase near the end is nicely done but ruins any atmosphere that has been worked up until then. The best scenes involve Vardella, played under effectively horrific make up by a man (Joe Riley). Her torture scene at the beginning is the highlight of the movie; nothing else comes close to topping that. [YouTube]