Directed by Mario Bava
Written by Anton Checkov, Aleksei Tolstoy, Guy de Maupassant
Stars Boris Karloff, Michèle Mercier, Mark Damon, Jacqueline Pierreux
Run Time: 1 Hour 32 Minutes
Synopsis
We watched the American International version of the film, in English. Supposedly, the Italian version is brighter and a bit longer.
Boris Karloff introduces himself and explains that this is an anthology of three tales.
“La Goccia D’Acqua”
Helen gets a phone call on a really old phone. She is told to come down right now, but she doesn’t really want to. Over at the big house, the maid answers the door and lets Helen in. The maid tried to manage the patient, but Helen is an expert. The patient is a medium, and she’s threatened a curse on those she doesn’t like.
Helen pulls the curtain away, and the patient is dead– and has been for a while. The maid complains that the spirits of the dead killed her; even her relatives were afraid to come around. She talked to the dead every Friday, and she died during one of those sessions.
Helen notices the big honking ring on the corpse’s finger and steals it. The body doesn’t want to stay put, but Helen eventually forces her hands together. She knocks over a glass of water that drips on her.
Helen then goes home and puts the ring on. A big fly attacks her, and she waves it off, but then notices the ring is missing. She starts to hear water dripping somewhere. She finds water dripping here and there, but the dripping won’t go away.
The fly, the dripping, and the blinking lights start to get to Helen, and she finally screams. Finally, she opens the bedroom door and sees the dead woman in there, who gets up. The dead woman, who looks suspiciously like a puppet, comes closer and closer to Helen. Helen then strangles herself in her madness. The neighbor calls the police and explains what happened. They find no one there but Helen. The policeman says she had been frightened to death.
Il Telefono
Karloff comes back, complaining about telephone calls at inopportune times and leads us into the second installment.
Rosy comes home late at night, just missing the phone ringing. It rings again, and this time, she answers it. Unfortunately, there’s no one on the other end of the line. This repeats several times with no one there. Finally, there’s a man, “Hello Rosy.” He describes what she’s wearing as if he can see her right now.
He calls again and tells her to take off all her clothes. She gets ready for bed and locks the door extra tightly. She looks all around and hides her money and jewelry under the couch. He calls back and explains that he saw her do that. He says they’ll be together soon; she will die before dawn.
She finds a blank piece of paper slipped under her door, and ghostly words appear on it as she reads along. He calls back on the phone, and she says, “Frank is dead. You can’t be Frank.” Could it be Frank’s ghost? Rosy calls Mary and says what just happened. Mary believes Frank is dead. Rosy wants Mary to rush right over. Frank calls back and explains that Rosy will soon be dead. Rosy was the one who turned Frank in, and he knew it.
Later that night, someone comes in the front door and slowly talks around the house. He sneaks up behind Mary and strangles her. Rosy wakes up and sees Frank standing in her room. He climbs on top of her, and she stabs him with the butcher knife. His voice still comes in over the telephone.
“I Wurdalak”
Karloff comes back to tell us a bit about vampires. The only thing all the stories agree upon is that vampires drink blood. The Wurdulak lives on the blood only of those they love.
A young man named Vladimir on a horse finds the body of a man run through with a dagger. As the sun goes down, he passes the nearby castle and stops at a house for the night. A man named Ivan comes downstairs and says the dagger belongs to his father. The body belongs to Aribek, a Turkish Bandit, sometimes called a Wurdalak, and the locals are really glad he’s dead.
The man at the house says that now that the Wurdalak is dead, they only have their father to fear. He says that if his father doesn’t come home within the next hour, then Vladimir will be better off leaving immediately. Vlad doesn’t want to leave because he’s smitten by Sdenka. The father went away five days ago and explained that if he didn’t come home within five days that they shouldn’t let him in, as he would have become a Wurdalak. The deadline passes.
They see the old man approaching through the mists as the dog howls. He explains that he’s hungry. The old man, Gorca, asks how long Vladimir will be staying. He gets tired of hearing the dog howling (as were we all), and orders Pietro to go outside and kill him.
Gorca pulls the head of Aribek the Bandit from his sack. He orders it to be hung on the door of the house for all to see. Gorca sneaks into Vlad’s bedroom that night, but when Vladimir wakes up, she sees the old man outside the window.
The old man sneaks around the house that night, and everyone is asleep. He grabs the little boy and carries him outside, but Vladimir spots this through the window again.
Gorca and the boy ride up the mountain with Ivan in pursuit. Vlad stays behind to comfort Sdenka, who wants her to run away with him. Ivan brings the boy back, dead. Ivan wants to cut the boy’s head off for safety but his mother refuses to allow it.
Even later that night, Vlad and Sdenka sneak out to the horses. Ivan and Marie wake up and see the little boy outside calling for his mother. Ivan tells her not to go outside, but she’s crazy and stabs him. Gorca comes in and kills her immediately.
Vlad and Sdenka stop the rest of the night at the old castle. Gorca follows them there and calls Sdenka to him with hypnosis. The others are there too, the whole family are Wurdalaks now.
Vladimir wakes up and goes looking for Sdenka. She’s gone, so he rides back to the house looking for her. She clutches her throat and warns him to ride on without her, but he refuses to leave her. Before long, it’s one big undead family…
Commentary
It had a low budget, and it shows. The acting is minimal at best, and some parts of each story felt dragged out, some for far, far too long. The cast was too small, and the sets too limited. There just wasn’t very much going on in any of the stories either.
It wasn’t very well balanced, as the vampire segment was about twice as long as the other two stories. It was an Italian film financed with American money, so there’s very little unnecessary dialog, since they knew it would all have to be dubbed. There’s very little music and absolutely no humor– it’s just really boring.
Karloff had a pretty big role in the third segment, and he was the only one who even attempted real acting. Supposedly, he had a lot more to talk about as he introduced the segments, but most that is said to have hit the cutting room floor.