Sun 6 Oct 2019
A Horror Movie Review by Jonathan Lewis: CAVE OF THE LIVING DEAD (1964).
Posted by Steve under Horror movies , Reviews[3] Comments
CAVE OF THE LIVING DEAD. Schneider-Filmverleih, West Germany, 1964. Also released as Night of the Vampires. Original title: Der Fluch der grünen Augen. Adrian Hoven, Erika Remberg, Carl Möhner, Wolfgang Preiss, Karin Field. Director: Ãkos Ráthonyi.
Cave of the Living Dead , a West German-Yugoslav production, is a pretty standard vampire movie that checks all the boxes and uses all the tropes. Let’s see. You’ve got an urbane police inspector skeptical of the supernatural, superstitious peasants, an array of beautiful women (some undead, some not), and an eccentric professor living high up in a castle. And of course, some unexplained mysterious deaths.
But for all its schlock, this movie is actually a lot of fun. Part of it comes from its mashup of genres. What starts off as a pulpy detective yarn in which a big city inspector is sent to the backwoods of Yugoslavia to investigate a series of murders slowly reveals itself to be a supernatural yarn about sultry female vampires.
Although not a particularly graphic film in terms of violence or gore, Cave is drenched in atmosphere. Filmed in black and white with a lot of natural light courtesy of candles or torches, this somewhat obscure horror film exudes a neo-Universal Horror classics aesthetic. It transports the viewer into its own claustrophobic village world.
True, the dialogue is hardly sophisticated. And the plot often runs around in circles. But if you are looking for a unique Halloween month viewing, this one, which I personally watched on DVD, is worth a look.
October 6th, 2019 at 5:26 pm
Sometimes when they dub these, they take a minimalist approach to writing the dialogue, too often read by actors whose disdain is all too apparent. It’s as if the scribes & the thespians were fighting a Battle of Mutual Contempt.
October 6th, 2019 at 6:59 pm
One of the things they did in this era was to mix the usual suspects from Edgar Wallace Krimi films in horror so the films often played like thrillers then turned to the supernatural as the Wallace films often began as horror and then turned to thriller. They worked more often than not either way.
April 28th, 2021 at 10:09 am
Hi! How are You today? Sorry I am very very late on this post, but just want to say that with Erika Remberg in a movie You will know it is Horror and Thriller and Sex, She was a Specialist in those. Thanks for this blog and take care and God Bless.P.S. Evan though Her Beauty, those kind of Actresses are not my forte fro the exception of Anita Ekberg or Senta Berger