The Wailing aka Murder Syndrome aka Fear aka Delrium aka Satan's Alter

I really love the compilation movie Zombiethon. Probably far more than I should, but there are sentimental reasons involved. In the late 80's and early 90's I used to rent the Wizard Video big box VHS version of Zombiethon every six months from the Dollar Video. These were the days when the video store was a destination. You got your snacks, you got an armload of videos, and maybe you didn't leave the apartment for a few days. Later I found out maybe you also had a personality disorder, but if you've got to have something, having a disorder that leads you to hole up in your dark apartment for four days eating instant Won Ton soup, drinking Tab Cola, and watching zombie movies on VHS doesn't seem like the worst thing that could happen. 

There are seven or eight zombie movies Zombiethon draws clips from. I can't name them all off hand right now. I actually probably can... Zombie Lake, A Virgin Among the Living Dead, Oasis of the Zombies, The Invisible Dead, The Alien Dead, Zombie, and the movie I'm watching tonight (if it ever loads on the Amazon player, that is) for the first time. It's called Murder Syndrome. And it's called Fear. And it's called Delirium. And it's called Satan's Alter. And ultimately they decided to title it The Wailing for worldwide English-language release. 

There's really no good reason for me to have rented it at one in the morning, but nonetheless, here we go. 

I guess seeing that box with the Wizard Video logo I'd probably like to find a copy of this on VHS. Pretty standard opening. Actor gets overwrought, tries to strangle and actress during filming of a movie, decides he needs a vacation, so retreats to an eerie family estate to relax. And it is is eerie. The actor's mother, who is supposedly dying, but still looks pretty dang good, seems really happy to see her son. Uncomfortably happy, and is terribly disappointed to see her son has brought along his girlfriend. I wonder what's going to happen. 

Methinks Anita Strindberg is a little too hot to have a strapping thirty year old actor son. But nudity to the rescue. What next? Are you going to tell me the actor's friends start showing up and putting themselves in precarious positions where they could easily be knocked off in gruesome ways by someone, or some thing, that inhabits the estate?

Listen, I'm just going to have a quick shag with Laura Gemser, you know, the chick who played one of the Emmanuels. What could go wrong? 

Ahhhhhh. Shit, I hope nobody saw that. They'll put her spleen back in, right? This is turning out to be a very bad weekend. What else could even possibly go wrong?

Son of a bitch. Listen, I'm going to go watch the final 57 minutes of this movie and have a cup of tea. If you want to know what happens, you go ahead and rent The Wailing on Amazon, or wait for Netflix to add it, which, let me look at my watch, ain't never going to happen. Seems pretty good from the bit I was able to watch between typing this and having only bar of connectivity right now. 

I lied, I'm back. Because this chick goes down the stairs, runs into the spider, decides to run through the woods, then ends up back in the basement, where these two figures are waiting for her as Bach's "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring" plays. And that's pretty more than ok for two a.m. I'll let you know if anything equally that good happens in the last thirty minutes. 








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