(aka The Night the Screaming Stopped, When the Screaming Stops, Grasp of the Lorelei, The Lorelei’s Grasp)
Director: Amando De Ossorio
Writer: Amando De Ossorio
Starring: Tony Kendall, Helga Line, Silvia Tortosa.
Amando De Ossorio is better known for the Blind Dead series, but in The Loreley’s Grasp he directs this fairly interesting potboiler based on German mythology. The Loreley in the title refers to one of the Rhine Maidens who would lure sailors to their deaths on the banks of the Rhine in Germany. In this ”retelling” the Loreley is killing the people of the village, particularly young girls, by ripping them to shreds and eating their hearts.
I’m not really giving anything away here. After the first victim is found dead, a young bride-to-be who minutes earlier got visited by her husband-to-be the night before their wedding (talk about bad luck!), is viciously ripped to shreds by a green rubber handed monster, the villagers instantly know what happened. The Loreley, of course!
This is the problem with Amando De Ossorio. He writes and directs most of his work, and the writing is often just poorly done. His direction and execution is competent, which always always helps keep the films engaging, even if the writing leaves a lot to be desired.
One death in the village and everyone is talking about the Loreley… Okay, so the girl was clawed to death and her heart ripped out, but come on! Even the local school, who have building full of bikini glad young women, come into town requesting some security since the woman killed was young.
But the town are only too happy to oblige the school, and they send their very best hunter, Sirgurd (Tony Kendall). He isn’t quite what they expect, turning out to be a dashing dark haired prince… um, I mean, he isn’t old. So all the women Oooo and Arrrr over the only man in the building and are only too happy to give him a midnight show as he wonders the grounds. He has to be reminded what he’s there to protect after all, but alas, it’s far more innocent than I’m alluding too and the show is over before anything of substance is revealed.
It’s not long before the Loreley is on the prowl again. A young woman is left alone and the beast creeps up on the unsuspecting victim as it proceeds to breathe louder than Darth Vader with a cold. Before you can say “Luke, I am your father”, the Loreley is on her and ripping her shreds.
That night Sirgurd sees a woman running around the grounds after specifically telling them they weren’t to be running around after dark. He follows her but loses her very quickly. The next morning while at the funeral for the girl killed the night before, Sirgurd sees a woman watching from a carriage, but she disappears also. It isn’t until Sirgurd is forced to bath in the river after being refused the possibility of bathing in the swimming pool with the hot bikini clad babes that he gets a good look at this mysterious woman (Helga Line).
Now it really at this point you should really be putting two and two together. The villagers have been talking about the Loreley as a woman who turns into a beast that kills to satisfy its craving for human hearts, and this woman is disappearing and reappearing mysteriously and is the only strange character in the film, so…
The dead start piling up in town after the local Loreley expert, the village blind man, gets killed and has his heart ripped out in a fairly graphic fashion. Then the next expert to die is a Professor who is conducting experiments into the nature of the Loreley, but lucky for us he gets a hold of Sirgurd on his way back from his dip in the river and tells him everything he needs to know before he comes face to face with the Loreley. He explains that he”s managed to recreate the effect of the Loreley’s affliction and shows how with a radioactive knife you can kill the unkillable. Yeah, it”s pretty silly stuff.
It isn’t long before Sirgurd comes face to face with Loreley, yes the woman explains her name, and he still doesn”t quite put two and two together. But he kisses her and she likes it, and well, one thing leads to another… but she passes out while he removes her neckless and he”s out of luck. Her servant appears to take her away, and while Sirgurd retrieves her neckless, they disappear into the lake, and he is left cufuzzled.
When Sirgurd is told of the blind man’s death, he goes to find the professor for help, but finds him dead too. It soon becomes apparent that’s he’s the only one left that can do anything and it’s not long (or it’s about bloody time) before he starts seeing what’s going on and decides to take a late afternoon swim in the river in search of the Loreley, since that”s where it lives.
For as flawed as Loreley’s Grasp is, its a lot of fun. It’s hard to take some of these Spanish movies too seriously, but still there is something uniquely appealing about them. They are often firmly in Hammer horror territory, and while Hammer might have been dying the Spanish managed to carry on the tradition during the final years of the Franco dictatorship hounding Spain, and that can only be a good thing.
The acting isn’t too bad for the most part, there are a couple ridiculous characters (like the professor) but things like that are easily overlooked in the low budget arena. The effects aren’t great, the Loreley is first seen as a gloved hand that is as bad as any Japanese monster movie with a man in the suit, but hey it’s a low budget effort so what can we expect. There is a fairly impressive transformation scene that is handled rather well considering the budget. The most impressive thing about Loreley’s Grasp is the films overall look, De Ossorio is obviously capable of getting what he wants and constructing it well, it’s just a shame about the plot. Deimos DVD have, as they have with other releases, done a great job of securing a really really nice print directly from the original negative of this far from classic movie. Worth seeking out if you can overlook it’s flaws.
