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Plenty to Like, Plenty to Dislike

everything you have heard about this movie is true.

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

The movie runs out of plot and jokes well before the end of a two-hour running time, long for a light comedy.

A superior Spanish shocker, which charts the life of a hunchback as he is abused by some and falls in love with others. However, being an X-rated horror flick, heavy lashings of gore and general grisliness are added into the mix, to create unforgettable moments and alleviate from the otherwise routine story. The film's strength lies in the evocative and moving musical score, which really helped to set the scene for me, and the atmospheric location of the underground cavern which is brimming with Gothic dread and foreboding. Paul Naschy takes the lead role and brings life and sympathy to his anti-hero, a villain who is drawn into his acts either as a last resort or as a result of someone else's evil.What could have been just another brutal monster turns out to be a pathetic but deeply just and noble person; moments of Naschy kissing the feet of those he appreciates are at odds to shots of him brutally murdering numerous victims, and in the end Naschy's strong acting means that you can't help but like him, even if he is a multiple murderer and sadist! The strong Spanish supporting cast includes Alberto Dalbes' fine performance as a deranged and evil scientist, genre regular Maria Perschy as a doctor and Rosanna Yanni as a genuinely beautiful love interest - yes, even a hunchback can love! Once again, this Naschy film's strength is in the numerous plot strands and ideas that it throws into the mix to keep it going nicely. As well as the character study of Gotho, the film includes romance and sex and themes of power and its abuse. The horror elements are also varied and interesting. The film begins with a scene of a corpse being bloodily cut up with a knife and doesn't get any easier to take from there! Corpses have their faces eaten apart by rats, there's a string of gore murders, hijinks involving a severed head, grave-robbing, and a mad scientist, and a convenient acid bath into which many characters fall and are lovingly dissolved in detail. One of my favourite aspects is the monster in the cellar which screams and cries with terrible noises, really building up the unseen terror. When it finally escapes to go on a rampage, the slimy humanoid creature doesn't disappoint in special effects either.The gore is over-the-top and extremely explicit, even for a Naschy movie. Characters are decapitated and eviscerated (guts everywhere), strangled, dissolved, spiked in iron maidens, have their faces destroyed with acid, and mutilated. However, the film's most unpleasantly memorable scene doesn't involve any special effects whatsoever - yes, it's an unfaked scene of animal violence! This mondo madness occurs when Gotho discovers rats eating his girlfriend and attacks them with a torch (Naschy himself was famously bitten during this ordeal). Cue lots of shots of scampering, squealing, and burning rats; for a rodent lover such as myself, these scenes are really quite hard to take and unnecessarily long with it! Thankfully this is the only example of mondo violence in the film - and in Naschy's long career also.Otherwise, the action/fight scenes are well-staged and exciting, the acting pretty good all things considered, the dubbing not too intrusive, the effects good, and the atmosphere and suspense strong. Worth checking out for all genre fans and a must-see film for Naschy followers in particular, this more than stands up against the best of his Waldemar Daninsky - werewolf output. Highly recommended.

A surprisingly jaunty theme tune introduces what proves to be one of Paul Naschy's more exploitative and downbeat movies, a gory Gothic tragedy in which the Spanish horror star plays Gotho, a hunchbacked morgue attendant in love with a terminally ill girl named Ilse (María Elena Arpón). When Ilse finally pops her clogs, a grief stricken Gotho steals her body (after brutally killing the doctors who try to half-inch her necklace), and takes her to a subterranean hideaway where he assists a trio of slightly mad scientists to construct a laboratory (in record time) with which they can create life, a process that requires a continuous supply of fresh body parts...Taking its cues from the classic horror novels of Victor Hugo and Mary Shelley, The Hunchback of the Morgue is full of irresistibly silly horror clichés—a sympathetic 'monster', a dusty Spanish Inquisition torture chamber, grave-robbing by moonlight, a sulphuric acid pit—and also benefits from some delightfully tacky special effects: a gory decapitation, a gutsy evisceration, assorted dismemberment, Ilse's corpse being devoured by rats (which, in a shocking moment of genuine animal cruelty, are set on fire by Gotho), and a delightfully daft man-made creature that consumes everything from live frogs to human heads, and ends up looking like a giant walking turd.It all adds up to a whole lot of demented fun, easily the most entertaining Naschy film I've seen so far.

From the jaunty circus music that plays during its opening credits to the closing shot of a steaming, bubbling pit of sulfuric acid, "The Hunchback of the Morgue," a Spanish offering from 1973, literally busts a gut to please the jaded horror fan. Cowritten and starring "The Boris Karloff of Spain," Paul Naschy, the film is a wildly over-the-top, cheesy affair that yet succeeds in its primary intentions: to stun and entertain the viewer. In it, Naschy plays the title character, Wolfgang Gotho, a hunchbacked janitor in the morgue of the Feldkirch Hospital, in what the viewer must infer is Germany, in modern times (although the film, with very minor revisions, could just as easily have been set 200 years ago). Shunned, reviled and even stoned by the town's populace, Gotho's only joy in life is bringing flowers to Ilse, a beautiful young woman in the hospital who is dying of some unspecified lung disease, and played by the luscious Maria Elena Arpon. When Ilse ultimately does expire, the distraught Gotho steals her body, hides it in the subterranean crypts (once a torturer's lair during the Inquisition) conveniently near the hospital, and asks the head man at Feldkirch, Dr. Orla (Alberto Dalbes), for assistance in bringing the dead lovely back to the land of the living. Orla agrees, but on one condition: that Gotho will help him in his experiments to create artificial life....As I said, "THOTM" really goes out of its way to present itself as some kind of total horror show. The film boasts any number of satisfyingly tacky grossout effects, including some slit throats, various dismemberments, decapitations, a nasty ax blow to the stomach (as mentioned, literally busting a gut!), rats, rats on fire (apparently, some animals really WERE harmed in the making of this picture!), rats nibbling on corpses, acid-melted bodies, a gruesome iron-maiden spiking and on and on. The creature that Orla creates, at first shown as a large jar of quivering viscera feeding on human heads, ultimately morphs into yet another pleasing horror image: a humanoid entity that looks like a glob of melted mud! Naschy is quite fine as the simpleminded Gotho, even eliciting viewer sympathy for the grotesque character, despite his murderous tendencies; the early scenes between Gotho and Ilse are actually fairly touching, and even--dare I say it--a bit poetic! Besides the catchy circus music that opens the film, composer Carmelo Bernaola has also provided a morbid, dirgelike piece that permeates the picture very appropriately, and director Javier Aguirre does a better than competent job at creating an atmosphere of decay and unease. On a personal note, as an old fan of horror great H.P. Lovecraft, I must automatically give extra Brownie points to any film that mentions the "Necronomicon," as this one so cleverly does. "THOTM" may be some kind of perfect film to watch with your favorite 12-year-old nephew, who will surely delight at the loopiness of the plot and the film's many yucky visuals.As for the Mya DVD that I recently viewed this picture on, it looks good enough, I suppose, if a tad dark in sections, but sports subtitles (for the English, Spanish and Italian language options) that have been very poorly rendered and, in spots, amusingly translated. Thus, in one scene, Elke--a beautiful psychologist at a women's prison from which Gotho is abducting some victims, and played by Rossana Yani--says to Gotho, "I'll medicate your wounds." But at least the DVD comes with more extras than you might expect to accompany a film of this nature. Bottom line: a highly pleasing horror outing, one that I have a, um, hunch that you'll enjoy, although not terribly scary. Indeed, the film's single most frightening scene might occur at the very outset: the sight of one of Gotho's future victims downing TWO gallon-sized glasses of beer in rapid succession. Now THAT'S scary!

Even though it doesn't feature one, I can't think of a better example than HUNCHBACK OF THE MORGUE for a film capturing an all-encompassing feeling of atmosphere and oddity that surrounded those side show carnivals that were equal parts curiosity, repulsion, and pathos for the things paraded on display. FREAKS has the revenge tale morality of its real life freaks covered, carrying with them a sense of uneasy understanding and likability. But HUNCHBACK OF THE MORGUE is more designed like one of those things in a jar that pits your stomach against your lunch like it used to when you saw a preserved human limb suspended in a laboratory vat, while also being inspired by Naschy's own unnerving personal experience with a miss-fortuned humpback. There is no denying the exploitative nature of the attractions.HUNCHBACK OF THE MORGUE invites the viewer from its opening polka like musical theme, to a seemingly sleepy little Austrian town in the fall or summer depending on what version you see, but it was shot in the summer. Paul Naschy plays the titular hunchback Gotho, who works at the local morgue 'cleaning' up and falls in love with Ilsa, a young women at the infirmary who eventually dies. He meets a deranged scientist who promises to help bring Gotho's love back if he'll supply his experiment - in Burke and Hare fashion - with fresh cadaver parts.Like director Javier Aguirre's other Naschy vehicle COUNT DRACULA'S GREAT LOVE, the star is painted as sympathetic and world weary from his lot in life, but who's prone to indefensible acts with corpses also, and like a malignancy his madness grows from his obsession to restore Ilsa. The film works off this to a delirious pitch shifting from sick dismemberment, heart felt romanticism, obligatory female nudity, and scaling stunt theatrics at the drop of a hat; with Naschy supplying one of his most physical performances. Cobble this with the authentic air of subterranean catacombs from The Crusades as a backdrop for the depravity that poses a genuine stench of decay and mystery, as science takes the place of religion blinded by its own power, and shot in an expressionistic style for optimum effect.The film never loses sight that it's an anomaly of the absurd though, embracing it to the very end when the thing in the jar breaks loose in a folly of gelatinous mass. Whatever it is hardly matters, its fitful existence doomed by the hands of its creator. A suitable hodge-podge of every mad doctor film that came before it, Hugo's Quasimodo, with characteristic elements of over the top dramatics and carnality that signified Naschy's unbridled charm. Just pull back the curtain...9/10