Last Orgy By The Cemetery Extracts
LAST ORGY BY THE CEMETERY is a book that provides a detailed synopsis of 75 key films branded ‘video nasties’ in the UK in the 1980s. The films are presented without criticism or commentary, and the book may be considered a nostalgic reverie for fans and collectors who don’t have the fortitude to sit through these films again and would like an aide-memoire.
This material originally appeared in different form in the authors’ See No Evil: Banned Films and Video Controversy, published by Headpress in 2000 and now out of print.
Here follow extracts from the book.
story: John Cart [Aristide Massaccesi]
director: Peter newton [Aristide Massaccesi]
TWO MEN ARE RUNNING. To escape the other, one of the men accidentally gouges himself while scaling a spiked gate. He makes it as far as the door of a nearby house before his intestines spill out through his fingers.
“He isn’t going to make it,” a surgeon woefully confers during emergency treatment on the man. All signs of life drop from the monitors. Then they return.
“It’s absurd… completely absurd,” puzzles the surgeon. “Recuperative powers like that don’t exist.”
Sergeant Engleman finds evidence to suggest that the wounded man is from Greece, just like another stranger caught wandering the corridors of the hospital.
The wounded man becomes agitated, attacking a nurse and driving a surgical drill into her skull.
The second man confides to Engleman that he is a priest in pursuit of the wounded one. And not just any priest: “There exists a reality that we do not see,” he states. “I serve God with biochemistry, more than with rites.”
The wounded man’s name is Nikos Thanopolous and, because of experimental work the priest was conducting at an institute in Greece, Nikos became immortal and escaped. He can regenerate dead cells but, unfortunately, “He does not regenerate cells perfectly… he is insane.”
Now he’s on the loose again.
One of the doctors, looking at a set of X-rays, notes that Nikos’ brain has got bigger.
“It is his brain that is his weak point,” says the priest.
Nikos stumbles upon an abattoir. With a machete he attacks a man who is cleaning up. The cleaner tries to stop him with a gun, but the bullets have no effect. Nikos grabs the man and sends him head-first into a band saw. The blade penetrates his bald dome.
Later, while setting upon a broken-down motorcyclist, Nikos is struck by a hit-and-run driver. Mr Bennett, the driver of the car (and coincidentally owner of the house on whose doorstep Nikos earlier spilled his intestines), has a dinner date with his wife and some friends that evening. The babysitter booked to look after their brattish son Willie and bed-ridden daughter Katya is late. Peggy, the home help, reluctantly agrees to stick around until she arrives.
Peggy tells Willie that if he doesn’t go to bed, the “Bogeyman” will get him.
Nikos turns up at the house, deftly sinking a pickaxe into Peggy’s head.
When Emily the babysitter does show, Peggy is nowhere around. Emily receives a phone call from a doctor friend at the hospital who fills her in on the recent spate of murders and Nikos. The only way to kill the monster is by destroying his “cerebral mass,” he tells her in passing.
Katya, in traction because of a deviation in her spine, draws geometric patterns all day long. Emily tries to comfort the girl by telling her that she is still young and will get better.
Willie says there’s a bogeyman in the kitchen. But, as he’s cried wolf once too often, no one believes him.
Meanwhile, at the house down the street, Mrs Bennett confronts her husband with regard to his strange, reserved behaviour.
“What’s the matter with you, Ian?”
“Nothing,” he replies, “other than running over a man today and not stopping to help him.”
“Ian!”
Emily discovers Peggy’s body and notices the telephone lines have been cut. Barricading herself in the bedroom with Katya, she sends Willie out to alert his parents. Frightened, he doubles back, forcing Emily to come out of hiding. She is captured, dragged by Nikos into the kitchen and has her head stuffed into a lighted oven. Her face starts to blister and turn purple as she is cooked alive.
Katya makes a concerted effort to struggle free of her sick bed. Hearing the commotion, Nikos breaks his way into the room, and she drives her drawing compass into his eyes, blinding him. He searches the room by touch, listening for the girl. Camouflaged by loud church music from her music centre, barely able to stand, Katya makes a shaky retreat from the room.
The priest arrives at the house just in time to free Katya from the monster’s clutches, before himself falling victim. Katya takes this opportunity to bring an axe down repeatedly on the monster’s neck.
“Look Willie,” Katya says, holding Nikos’ severed head aloft, “you don’t need to be afraid anymore!”
story: Luigi Montefiori & Aristide Massaccesi
director: Joe D’Amato [Aristide Massaccesi]
A COUPLE AND THEIR DOG go down to the deserted beach of a small Greek island. The man sunbathes with his out-sized radio headphones while the girl swims toward a small, abandoned boat. Something is watching her from below the surface. As she reaches the boat she is grabbed and dragged beneath the water where she disappears in a cloud of blood and fleshy lumps. The dog senses danger and runs away but the man is unaware of anything other than the music. Whatever attacked the girl is now on the beach advancing on the man. It raises a meat cleaver and brings it down, splitting his head open.
On the Greek mainland, tourists Carol, Maggie, Danny, Alec and Ernie befriend a lone traveller named Julie. Julie asks if she may join them on their boat for a ride to an island she is planning to visit. The group agrees and they all set sail for the island. During the voyage Carol reads tarot cards for the heavily pregnant Maggie and is disturbed by the results. “If you ask the cards about the future and don’t get any answer,” she explains, “that means there is no future for the person who’s asking them.” Once on the island they set out to explore the small town and walk Julie to the house where she is to stay. Maggie, however, sprains her ankle and decides to stay on board with Starfish, the deck hand.
The whole town seems deserted. Julie and Alec go to the store and find the telegraph machine destroyed. It is the only means of communication with the mainland and records show it hasn’t been used for a month. Carol and Ernie see a woman at a window and enter the house. Inside they cannot find her but see a message written in the grime on the window. “Go Away,” it warns. Ernie sees the woman making off in the street and goes after her. Carol, intending to follow, stumbles into a corpse sitting in a chair in one of the rooms.
Back at the boat, Maggie asks Starfish to fetch a bucket of water in which to soak her ankle. As he lowers the bucket over the side he is pulled into the water. Maggie goes to see where he is and hoists the tethered bucket back onto the deck only to discover Starfish’s severed head in it.
The others have regrouped to examine the corpse in the house and conclude it has been partially eaten. Suddenly concerned about Maggie’s safety they rush back to the harbour but see the boat has been set adrift. Unable to do anything else, they go to the house where Julie is to stay, but that also proves deserted. As a storm rages outside, Julie suggests they should look for Maggie in case she got off the boat before it went adrift. Carol says it’s useless, “There’s an evil on this island, an evil that won’t let us get away, an evil that sends out an inhuman diabolic power.”
In the night, Julie and Danny are awoken and go to investigate the sound of a piano playing. In the cellar they find the source of the noise: a piano with a kitten walking on the keys. They both relax and laugh, when suddenly a girl lunges from a wine barrel and slashes wildly at Danny. It is Greta, the blind girl Julie has come to attend. They calm her and question her, but she cannot explain the missing inhabitants. Instead she tells them of a strange man on the island, one who smells of blood.
Later, Greta is woken from her sleep and cries, “He’s here.” Danny goes downstairs to investigate but finds nothing. He returns to Greta’s room, assures her everything is okay and locks the door, unaware that the hideous blood-smelling man is behind it. He advances on Greta who screams, and Danny races back into the room but proves no match for the large man. He is sent sprawling on the floor and the man bites a mouthful of flesh from his shoulder.
The following day, with Danny now dead, Julie, Greta, Ernie and Alec go in search of Carol who has run off and failed to return. They come to a large house, but as they enter it the mystery woman who has been prowling around hangs herself from the stairwell. Upstairs they find Carol and from the upper window Ernie and Alec see that the boat has come nearer to the shore. They leave the three women in the house and head off to the boat. Along the way, Ernie finds Maggie’s shoe and makes a detour to search for his wife. He descends into archaic burial catacombs filled with rats and human remains, at the end of which he finds Maggie stuffed in a burial niche, but alive.
In the house Julie discovers a secret room filled with mummified corpses. She also finds a diary that tells of the horrible events that have overtaken the island and learns of a man who was shipwrecked with his wife and child and had to eat the dead body of his son to survive. His wife, so appalled by her husband’s actions, killed herself.
In the catacombs the cannibal is advancing on Ernie and Maggie. Ernie begs for their lives, and the killer recalls the fate of his own wife and child — but he is now completely insane and oblivious to the pleas, drives a knife into Ernie’s chest. As Ernie lies dying, he sees the man strangle Maggie before pulling the foetus from her womb and devouring it.
Julie is reading the diary she has found in the secret room when Carol enters with her throat slit. The cannibal makes a lunge at Julie, but she escapes up the stairs. Together with Greta they climb into the loft and lock the trapdoor. Moments later the cannibal smashes his hand through the roof, drags Greta out by her hair and bites open her throat. Julie swings at him with a pickaxe and drives it into his leg. He falls from the roof.
Armed with the pickaxe Julie goes in search of the body, but looking down the well she is grabbed and pulled in. With her hand tangled in the rope she hangs above the water as the cannibal climbs up the rung ladder towards her. She manages to get onto the ladder and out of the well but is still caught in the rope — the trailing end of which the cannibal now has hold. As he moves towards her, Alec suddenly appears and drives the pickaxe into the cannibal’s stomach. Stumbling to his knees, the cannibal clutches his own intestines as they spill from his wound, then tries to eat them before he dies.
story: Frederick R Friedel
director: Frederick R Friedel
THREE MEN IN SUITS — Steele, Lomax and Billy — break into an apartment and await the arrival of Aubrey. Lomax passes the time by burning holes into female clothing he has found in the wardrobe. Billy keeps watch from the window. Steele, the gang leader, casually picks his nails.
When Aubrey arrives, Lomax and Steele accuse him of having a “whining mouth,” then stub a cigar out in it before accidentally beating him to death. Aubrey’s friend, a man who has been cowering in the corner, suddenly leaps from the ninth storey window when attentions are turned towards him.
The gang decide to head out of town to lay low for a while. Billy, the youngest member of the outfit, voices his dissatisfaction and stares distractedly out the back window of the car. Pulling over at a store, Billy waits as his companions go inside and start to kick up a fuss. Steele takes a bite from an apple and throws what’s left at the cashier.
“Do you call this fresh fruit?” he complains.
“We’re very sorry,” the cashier replies, in a manner that suggests she might be versed in the apology. “Please take another one if you like.”
Steele goes berserk, snatching fruit from the display rack and throwing it at the woman. Afterwards, he makes her take off her blouse at gunpoint. She starts to cry into her hands. The men place an apple on the distraught woman’s head and fire at it. Pouring a fizzy drink onto her breasts, the men leave.
On a farm further down the road, Lisa looks after her sick grandfather, who is paralysed and unable to communicate. Lisa has a constantly distracted expression on her face and hums a tuneless tune while chopping the head off a chicken. The gang turns up. “What do you want?” Lisa asks, completely nonplussed about their presence. When the outlaws discover that she is alone, save for an incapacitated grandfather, they decide to make themselves at home.
Two policemen show up. With Steele training a gun on her grandfather, Lisa sends the officers on their way.
During mealtime, Billy snaps when his partners make a funny remark about the girl.
Steele and Lomax give chase to a prowler.
In the bathroom, Lisa contemplates slitting her wrists.
At night, feverish with desire, Lomax sneaks into Lisa’s bedroom and rapes her. She pulls a cut-throat razor and slices his neck, killing him. Amazingly, nobody in the house hears Lomax scream, nor do they hear Lisa dragging his corpse into the bathroom, hacking it to pieces with an axe and sticking what’s left into a trunk. As Lisa tries to manoeuvre the trunk out of the bathroom the following morning, Billy offers his help. “What have you got in here?” he asks. “Old bowling balls?” He carries the trunk into the attic whereupon he discovers that it contains Lomax’ body.
Lisa blames the murder on “the other one.” Away from the house, Billy asks the girl for help, and mistakenly interprets the cut-throat in her hand as a weapon for him to use against Steele.
“You’re way ahead of me,” he says. “I’ll need that.”
Back indoors, Lisa tells Steele that Billy and Lomax have gone for a walk. Steele takes the opportunity to rape the girl, dragging her before her grandfather so that he might have a “real good TV show to watch.” Horse racing commentary from the TV set accompanies the struggle. Eventually Lisa manages to reach the axe that sits in the corner of the room and kills Steele with it.
Billy returns and sits down to a bowl of odd tasting “tomato” soup that Lisa has prepared, in which he discovers a ring belonging to Steele. Steele’s bloody body suddenly falls out of the chimney flue.
“No… no… no… no… no…” he mutters.
Running out of the house, the two cops from earlier shoot the reluctant outlaw dead and determine, “That’s one of them alright — she sure was right about it.”
Lisa hums a tuneless tune as she feeds gramps some more of the soup.
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