Mansion Of The Living Dead (1985)
Directed By Jess Franco
Starring Candy Coster (Lina Romay), Robert Foster (Antonio Mayans),Mabel Escano, Albino Graziani, Mamie Kaplan, Jasmina Bell & Eva Leon

DVD Released By Severin Films

Color/2.35:1/16x9/93 Minutes/Not Rated/Region 0 (NTSC)
Spanish w/English Subtitles
DVD Extras – ‘The Mansion Jess Built’ Interviews with Jess Franco and Lina Romay
Review By Douglas Waltz

Four waitresses/strippers get away from it all for a vacation at a seaside hotel on the coast of Spain. When they arrive all is not well. The hotel appears abandoned even though the hotel manager says that all the rooms are full. The girls decide to stay and enjoy themselves and that’s when it goes wrong. While sunbathing a cleaver is thrown at them and, even though no one is harmed, they are shaken by the experience.

Then one by one they start to disappear either by wandering over to a nearby monastery where they are gang raped and murdered by a group of undead monks who must sacrifice wanton souls to achieve true peace or they are led there my the cruel and mysterious hotel manager who gives the women over to the monks.
MANSION OF THE LIVING DEAD is pure Franco. After years of censorship in his native Spain the ban on such films was lifted and Franco wasted no time rushing home to make this film. Filled with what we come to expect from Franco, the film is filled with beautiful women, beautiful locations and the ever present zoom shot. Especially if a woman is completely naked the camera zooms to her groin, a typical Franco shot.

The film’s title is misleading in that there is no actual mansion of any kind in the movie. There is the hotel, a creature of its own possessed of some kind of macabre sentience through the masterful camerawork of Franco. Franco’s nom de plume of David Khune surfaces to proclaim that the film is based on the novel of the same name. A trick used in Franco’s Awful Dr. Orloff. There is no such book; it just lent a little more class to a truly nasty film. If the women aren’t crawling all over one another they are being violated by the monks repeatedly before their death which occurs by stabbing them repeatedly in the crotch.

True Franco aficionado will appreciate the time and effort that Severin Films has taken to bring this film to DVD. The transfer is crisp and clean with full, bright colors. It has probably never looked this good in any of its myriad incarnations. The interviews with Franco and Romay, while brief are very informative concerning the production of the film.

Antonio Mayans manages to chew up the scenery as the murderous, sadistic hotel manager who is giving over these women to the evil monks. His glare seems to emanate from the screen and you know that this is a true madman. Lina Romay in her Candy Coster incarnation, which means she dons a cheap, blonde wig, is a chunkier Romay than from her previous films. She is beginning to fill out and become more like the Romay of Franco’s more recent shot on DV films, but she is still quite lovely to the eye as are the other three women that play her cohorts.

A lot of people place this film in with the mythos of The Blind Dead series of films by Amando de Ossorio. This could not be farther from the truth. I would consider it more a homage to those films that Franco expresses a liking for than an actual chapter in the mythos of those films. His monks don’t appear blind and they are much cleaner and more active than the Blind Dead Templars of the other films.
Severin Films should be applauded for bringing yet another film of Franco’s to light and in a pristine condition to boot.