Deadly Manor Blu-ray

It is splendid to note all the posthumous plaudits uber-talented genre film-maker José Ramón Larraz Gil is currently garnering as each of his previously neglected films are lovingly restored for their entirely welcome Blu-ray editions, thereby allowing a new generation of horror film addicts to appreciate Larraz’s sterling shock-steeped work in such sublime clarity that pleasingly highlights the Spanish film-maker's enormous talent. Shot not long after his bloodier ‘Edge of The Axe’ (1988), Larraz’s macabre masterpiece, ‘Deadly Manor’ aka ‘Savage Lust’ (1990) while ostensibly mining somewhat similar slasher tropes is, from my skewed perspective at least, the more dramatically idiosyncratic of these two final gleefully grisly works from this marvellously entertaining, genre-bending cinema artiste. After picking up a suitably dishevelled, plainly furtive, plot-thickening hitch-hiker, our breezily vacationing protagonists find themselves quite literally off the beaten track, taking questionable sanctuary in said morbiferous manor house, a dangerously ramshackle, gloomily turreted, Gothic travesty, so palpably ominous as to give the ‘Bates Motel’ a grievous inferiority complex! Once playfully ensconced within this deadly mysterious domicile, our pleasantly jocular, conspicuously denim-clad clique of blithely trespassing misfits soon Scooby Doo themselves into a delightfully spooky maelstrom of increasingly weird events, as some monstrous manifestation of melt-faced evil torments them in a hysterically upsetting fashion until its laudably lurid, corpse-laden, banshee-wailing finale! To those jaded gore-hounds expecting a more familiar razor-straight slasher, Deadly Manor’s pointed lack of arterial over-spill might prove somewhat disappointing, but I still found enormous appeal in Larraz’s unpredictably loopy-Lou tale and the spooky film’s relative dearth of explicit gore is eerily replaced with ominous oodles of deliciously doomy, spine-fingeringly Gothic atmosphere, lashings of glib pre-kill repartee and last, but no means least, the wickedly voluptuous firebrand, Amanda (Jennifer Delora) makes for a memorably vivid, horrifically disfigured, mentally twisted, teen slaying despot!