Come for the Haeckel stay for the Savasta
Masters of Horror: Haeckel’s Tale (2006): 8 out of 10: Can one justify seeing a rather pedestrian one-hour episode because a gorgeous woman has one of the most bizarre and erotic sex scenes near the films “climax”? I will certainly try.
First the pedestrian stuff. This is a historical horror movie, all horse-drawn carriages and talk of electricity. It’s nice for a change of pace and is well done here.
The film’s main character is that old chestnut “a man of science”. He is trying to replicate Victor Frankenstein’s experiments and is instead of bringing them back to life, he ends up setting corpses on fire. The movie takes a very unexpected turn as he is summoned to see his dying father and precedes on a leisurely peregrination. Kind of like the trip Greg Kinnear takes in As Good As It Gets.
On his jaunt, he runs into a Necromancer that raises people from the dead. He comes across like a travelling snake oil salesman and is very well played by Coen brothers favorite Jon Polito (a cheap, talented Danny DeVito). Man of science is curious but disparages the hocus pocus mystical explanation of the necromancers skills.
The movie continues to meander much like the main character until he ends up at the house of a weird old man and his too young and too beautiful wife. This is where my patience with the film paid off.
Leela Savasta made such an impression on me I immediately want to see the rest of her films… both of them. Heck, I want to buy an office block in Vancouver. (She sells Canadian real estate as well as acting and modeling). Yes, I turned from bemused viewer to gushing fan boy almost immediately.
So in conclusion movie is decent, albeit slow, and Savasta will make a man leave his wife and travel a continent to buy a small affordable Canadian strip mall. Or at the very least, see that new Black Christmas remake. (I originally wrote this review on 20 December 20th, 2006, so the new Black Christmas remake I am referring to is the 2006 one. Hollywood being Hollywood, there has been a further Black Christmas remake in 2019 and who knows how many there are by the time you are reading this as a person of the future?)
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Honestly, this movie is relentlessly sexy. Those sex scenes are amazing and Leela Savasta has quite literally a perfect body and is sexiest woman i’ve ever seen. She made me do some sinful things to a zombie sex scene of all thing, leaving a young teen me very conflicted and that close up shot of her venus dimples are burnt into my retina. Makes Haeckel’s fate seem more like a reward than a tragedy. If death is all that it takes to be with Elise then so be it.