Plot
Anna Vernia, a beautiful young nurse, receives a medal of recognition for her outstanding dedication to her patients at the medical center where she works. She is going out with Victor Sender, a doctor working in the same hospital. Victor is deeply involved in a project that employs electro-shock therapy in violent criminals in an effort to turn them into model citizens.
Crime is rampant in the city. There has been a number of unresolved killings of young men which have been attributed to a serial killer believed to be a sadistic homosexual. A family is getting ready to watch Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange on television when they are assaulted by a gang of delinquents who knock at their door. The assailants, wearing red helmets, leather biker's outfits, and handling bullwhips smash the modern looking apartment. They rape both husband and wife but leave the couple's young son unharmed. After their crime, there is a dispute among the four members of the gang. One gang member, David, is beaten up and expelled from the group.
Anna is a pop art collector. She is the highest bidder in an auction of Alex Raymond’s artwork for Flash Gordon. At the auction, she gives her phone number to her bidder rival, Toni, a young man with a handicapped leg. Anna lives alone in a large mansion on the outskirts of the city where Toni comes to see her. After they have sex, Anna listens to Toni’s heartbeats while he sleeps and stabs him to death with a surgical scalpel. She disposes of Toni's body in a river, but she has been secretly observed by David. He finds out Anna's information through her car’s number plate and begins to follow her. Wearing a wig and dressed matronly, Anna seduces Bruno, a narcissistic underwear model, who she has seen on TV commercials. She takes him home and kills him. His body falls next to the book Anna was reading: Vladimir Nabokov's novel "Lolita".
Although Anna is still going out with Victor, she rebuffs his romantic advances. Dressed in drag, Anna enters a gay bar where she picks up Roman Mendoza, a gay man who she takes home. After dancing a waltz, Anna proposes to have sex. He is initially hesitant. He thought she was a lesbian. He had never had sex with a woman before, but he is game. While Anna was out, David entered her house after befriending the German Shepherd that guarded her property. Hiding behind curtains, David witnesses Anna seducing the young gay man and sees her stab him in the heart.
Broken glass inside her house alerts Anna that there is an intruder. When she looks outside she sees David playing with her dogs behind the mansion fence. Anna, pretending to be a maid, befriends David and invites him in. When she is going to start her pre-murder routine, David shows her the surgical scalpel used by Anna to kill her victims. She has been hiding it inside a music box. David does not want to denounce her to the police, but he begins to blackmail her instead. Through their monetary transactions, David begins to arouse Anna's personal interest. David buys a motorcycle with the money, but the members of his former gang, who believe he has stolen a bounty from them, pursue him and leave him badly beaten. David is taken to the hospital where Anna works. Since David was a violent criminal in the past, Victor wants to experiment on him the electro-shock therapy to turn killers like David into “useful citizens”. Anna is moved when she finds out that David is now her patient. She is not going to allow Victor to use David for his experiments. At night on New Year's Eve, Anna reads a poem by Edgar Allan Poe to David. When Victor arrives he finds Anna covered in David's blood after she killed him. In another room, the criminal patients in Victor's experiment go berserk, savagely killing each other.
Analysis
The film takes some cues from Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange to the extent that it was even released on 1980s UK VHS as Clockwork Terror. [9] Like its inspiration source the film is set in a near-future dystopian world where sadistic gangs attack, rape and steal from innocent people on the streets and in their homes. [10] To elaborate, the film plays on the Ludovico Technique of its predecessor as a neo-Fascist government tries to fight these crimes by conducting sinister mind-control experiments on captured criminals. This treatment ultimately backfires with bloody results at the end of the film. [11] [12]
The science fiction aesthetic of the film is more pronounced compared to Kubrick's with its retro-futuristic setting also recalling those of other 1970s science fiction films such as Soylent Green and Rollerball . [13] However, the film isn't a mere copycat of Kubrick's masterpiece as it also has the feel and construction (story development-wise) of the Italian Giallo films of the time as well as this genre's staple of gruesome murder scenes. [14] [15] It has also been argued that the film's graphic violence played an influence on some of Paul Verhoeven's films. [16]
A Clockwork Orange is directly referenced in the film, in a knowing and post-modern way that acknowledges the influence overtly. A family are seen settling down to watch a television broadcast of the film (with introductory onscreen images of Kubrick), just before their home is invaded and they are assaulted by a Droog-like gang.
Further examples of this tendency are the casting of Sue Lyon herself, whose character is shown reading Lolita .
Alex Raymond Flash Gordon art is depicted as highly valuable fine art, in a (then) satiric and prescient scene, which recalls a character's treasured collection of comic books in Elio Petri's The Tenth Victim .
In 1986 the film was released on UK VHS by Empire Video as Clockwork Terror and again in by Pagan Films as Murder in a Blue World with this second English title also used for its British DVD releases in 2004 and 2009 by Hanzibar Films and HB Films respectively. [17] [18] [19] The original Spanish version is 100 minutes long and when the film was first released on UK VHS as Clockwork Terror (running time - 96:42 minutes) it had two scenes of added expositional footage, but the BBFC cut 2:06 minutes of violent scenes which were later intact in the subsequent home video releases with the new title of Murder in a Blue World (running time - 98:21 minutes); in turn the two scenes of expositional dialogue were missing from these latter releases. [20] [21] To this day the entire uncut film hasn't been released on home video in its native Spain, the UK, the US or anywhere else, but if one watches the 1986 British VHS of the film and compares it to its later video and DVD releases (which all feature the same running time of the film print) in terms of the deleted scenes in each version then one can piece together how the whole unedited film would be like.
On 22 November 2022, the film was released on Blu-ray in North America by Cauldron Films, in what is advertised as a 'Producer's Cut', with a listed running time of 97 minutes. [22]
Dimension Films is an American film and television production and distribution company owned by Lantern Entertainment. It was formerly used as Harvey and Bob Weinstein's label within Miramax, which was acquired by The Walt Disney Company on June 30, 1993, and it later became a part of The Weinstein Company (TWC) from 2005 until 2018. The company produces and releases independent films and genre titles, specifically horror and science fiction films.
A Clockwork Orange is a 1971 dystopian crime film adapted, produced, and directed by Stanley Kubrick, based on Anthony Burgess's 1962 novel of the same name. It employs disturbing, violent images to comment on psychiatry, juvenile delinquency, youth gangs, and other social, political, and economic subjects in a dystopian near-future Britain.
Maniac is a 1980 American psychological slasher film directed by William Lustig and written by C. A. Rosenberg. It stars Joe Spinell as Frank Zito, an Italian-American serial killer residing in New York City who murders and scalps young women. Spinell was also co-writer of the film.
La Noche de Walpurgis /Walpurgis Night, is a 1970 Spanish/German horror film starring Paul Naschy, the fifth in his series about the werewolf Waldemar Daninsky. This film was directed by León Klimovsky and written by Paul Naschy, and is generally regarded to have kickstarted the Spanish horror film boom of the 1970s. This was Naschy's all-time most financially successful film. It was also the first of 8 films that he would make with director Leon Klimovsky at the helm.
Amando de Ossorio was one of the foremost Spanish horror film directors during the European horror film surge in the 1970s, known especially for his "Blind Dead" tetralogy.
The Phantom Carriage is a 1921 Swedish silent film directed by and starring Victor Sjöström, based on the 1912 novel Thy Soul Shall Bear Witness! (Körkarlen) by Swedish author Selma Lagerlöf. In the film, Sjöström plays a drunkard named David Holm who, on the night of New Year's Eve, is compelled by the ghostly driver of Death's carriage to reflect on his past mistakes. Alongside Sjöström, the film's cast includes Hilda Borgström, Tore Svennberg, and Astrid Holm.
Lucía Jiménez Arranz is a Spanish actress.
The Nameless is a 1999 Spanish horror film directed by Jaume Balagueró in his directorial debut, and starring Emma Vilarasau, Karra Elejalde, and Tristán Ulloa. Based on the 1981 horror novel of the same name by English writer Ramsey Campbell, it follows a mother who receives a phone call from her believed-deceased daughter five years after her apparent occult-related ritualized murder, uncovering a nefarious cult preoccupied with the metaphysical aspects of corruption and evil.
The Slayer is a 1982 American independent supernatural horror film directed by J. S. Cardone. Set on a small island near the Atlantic coast, the plot concerns two couples who upon visiting the island get trapped there due to an oncoming hurricane. As one of the women knows from her plaguing nightmares that the island is dangerous, over the next three days they begin to be killed by something unseen. The film is notable for gaining notoriety and being classified in the United Kingdom as a "video nasty" in the 1980s.
Killer's Moon is a 1978 British slasher film written and directed by Alan Birkinshaw, with uncredited dialogue written by his novelist sister, Fay Weldon, and starring Anthony Forrest, Tom Marshall, Jane Hayden, JoAnne Good, Nigel Gregory, David Jackson, and Lisa Vanderpump. It follows a group of schoolgirls on a choir trip who are terrorized by four escaped psychiatric patients on LSD while staying in a remote hotel in the Lake District.
The House That Screamed, also released as The Finishing School, is a 1969 Spanish slasher film written and directed by Narciso Ibáñez Serrador, and starring Lilli Palmer, Cristina Galbó, John Moulder-Brown, and Mary Maude. It follows Señora Fourneau, the strict headmistress of a nineteenth-century French boarding school for girls where the students begin to disappear under unusual circumstances.
Zombie Lake is a 1981 Spanish-French horror film directed by Jean Rollin and Julian de Laserna. The film starred Howard Vernon as the mayor of a small French town that is plagued by Nazi zombies who were killed by the town's villagers 20 years earlier. It was distributed by Eurociné.
Josefina Serrador Marí, better known as Pepita Serrador, was an Argentine film actress. She was married to the actor Narciso Ibáñez Menta the mother of the film director Narciso Ibáñez Serrador. She divorced her husband in 1947.
Seven Murders for Scotland Yard is a 1971 Italian-Spanish giallo film directed by José Luis Madrid and starring Paul Naschy, Patricia Loran and Renzo Marignano. Naschy and Madrid wrote the screenplay, Tito Carpi's name was simply added to the credits to satisfy the requirements for a Spanish-Italian co-production. The film was shot in June 1971, and was first released in Italy in 1971 as Sette Cadaveri per Scotland Yard / Seven Corpses for Scotland Yard. It was shown in Spain on July 10, 1972 as Jack el destripador de Londres, and finally wound up theatrically released in the U.S. in 1976 as Seven Murders for Scotland Yard. The Mexican one-sheet poster simply called the film Jack el distripador/ Jack the Ripper.
The Art of Dying is a 2000 Spanish horror film directed by Álvaro Fernández Armero from a screenplay by Juan Vicente Pozuelo and Curro Royo. It stars Fele Martínez, María Esteve, Gustavo Salmerón, Adrià Collado, Lucía Jiménez, Elsa Pataky, and Sergio Peris-Mencheta
The Loreley's Grasp is a 1973 Spanish horror film written and directed by Amando de Ossorio, and starring Tony Kendall, and Helga Liné. The film centers on a series of horrific murders in a German town by the Rhine river perpetrated by a deadly water spirit known as the Lorelei.
María Elena Arpón is a Spanish actress.
The Frenchman's Garden is a 1978 Spanish rural psycho-thriller film directed by Jacinto Molina based on the Frenchman's garden serial murder case. It stars María José Cantudo and Ágata Lys.
