The Long Hair of Death, 1964.

More Barbara Steele! And more Barbara Steele in a dual role! There’s also a Polish lass, Halina Zelewska in a dual role as well – as two characters named Karnstein. A connection to Carmilla? Perhaps. Interesting that this predates Hammer’s Vampire Lovers by 6 years but that hardly means it’s the earliest adaptation. Arguably, Universal’s Dracula’s Daughter from 1936 is an adaptation of Carmilla. The director, Antonion Margheriti has made some classics including Yor, Hunter from the Future (1983), and some African Merc films like Codename: Wild Geese (1984) (nothing to do with the Roger Moore film) starring Lee Van Cleef, Ernest Borgnine, and Klaus Kinski, and Commando Leopard (1985), also with Kinski. He also did Stranger and the Gunfighter (1974) aka Blood Money which I promise I’ll talk about some day – it’s got Lee Van Cleef and Lo Lieh and actually had the Shaw Bros in on the production.
The Poster is awesome and reminds me of The Masque of Red Death or the little skeletons on the cover of Castle Xyntillan (go buy this please, it’s amazing).

In the opening scenes we get some credits played over a dungeon’s wall and the movie leaps right into some sweet costumes with two guards in kettle-helms and brigandines and a monk in a spooky pointy hood escorting the Polish girl to be executed as a witch. Barbara Steele tries to intervene, has some creepy old baron get way too hands-y with her, there’s a witch burning, a death-curse from the witch which is pretty good and we get a time-leap. With two double-roles and the time-skip, this gets a tad bit confusing so I’ll break down the characters and they’re relationships here.

Pre Time-Skip:
Zelewska plays Adele Karnstein, mother of Helen and Lisabeth. She is killed.
Steele plays Helen Rochefort, née Karnstein, eldest daughter of Adele who gets thrown over a waterfall.
Some little girl plays Lisabeth Karnstein.

Post Time-Skip:
Zelewska plays the adult Lisabeth who’s forced to marry a total wiener grandson or nephew or something of the baron that killed her mother.
Steele plays Mary, some sort of mysterious witch.

While all this family drama goes on in the castle, the streets of the city are going crazy. A plague has struck and everyone’s always running around screaming as monks break into people’s homes to take bodies or soon-to-be bodies away (I’m not dead yet!) and I’m instantly drawn deeper into this film if only because I can use it as inspiration when running Swords & Sewercery. That has been your daily scheduled advertisement for my D&D modules.

As everyone knows, I like atmosphere and this movie has it. Priests reading from Revelations, church doors swinging open as lightning strikes only for a goth babe to be standing ominously in the door-way, dark shadowy castle dungeons, funerals with organs and chanting and more pointy-hooded monks, and curses. Excellent. For the record, I’m pretty sure the monks are Benedictines and I only bring this up as an opportunity to tell everyone how to identify Christian monastic orders – Benedictines wear black, Franciscans wear brown (think Friar Tuck), Carmelites wear brown with a white cape, and Dominicans wear black and white (which is why dalmatians feature in their art sometimes). And while I’m at it we can do crusading military orders – Knights Templar have a red cross, Teutonic Knights have a black cross, Knights of the Sepulchre have the Georgian flag, Knights Hospitaller have the Maltese cross, and the Leper Knights have a green cross. Now you know.

Back to the movie, the loser groom of Lisabeth has the hots for Mary and there’s some drama regarding everyone’s feelings and then we get treated to some castle-dungeon exploration making this an official Dungeons & Dragons film complete with secret doors. It would have been nice to break up some of the people-in-a-castle-talking scenes with more of the village going nuts but at least we get a scene of the annoying groom being visited by an apparition trying to kiss him in his sleep which reminds me of that time I had sleep paralysis. At some point this crazy skeleton effigy thing gets introduced as part of a ritual to cleanse the plague I think (I could be wildly off on that) and it looks pretty cool. It’s eventually used as an iron maiden-wicker man sort of deal which is awesome. And has nothing to do with the song titled Wicker Man by Iron Maiden

Minor gripe, I’m watching this on Tubi (great service, go get it – it’s free) and the film’s quality isn’t great. The picture is blurry and the sound is a bit warbly. I actually enjoy the distorted sound, as if coming from a degraded VHS tape but the picture quality is disappointing. I don’t know if any high-res versions of this are even in existence but it’s a decent enough film and would be nice to see a higher quality copy in line with what I’ve seen in Black Sunday, Nightmare Castle, or Curse of the Crimson Altar.
Beasts in the form of a witch, no breasts, and no blood but we get a witch being Burned at the stake so I’ll count that as bloody violence. Gets by on a technicality. Quality be damned, this is a fun movie to watch with the lights off at about 21:30. Just long enough that by the time it’s over you’ll be tired and ready for bed. Parts of this remind me of one of my favourite shows (a fact I’m only a little shamed to admit) Dark Shadows. Definitely has the same energy but a bit less melodramatic. The film drags a bit but I like watching the Groom’s descent into madness and the corpse effects that just look like bad papier-mâché. I’ll give it a One Thumb Up Seal of Approval.