As Good As It Gets

I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

Simple and well acted, it has tension enough to knot the stomach.

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

"Der Turm der verbotenen Liebe" or "Tower of Sin" or "She Lost Her... You Know What" or "Tower of Screaming Virgins" is a West German / French /Italian co-production from 1968 that resulted in this German-language film, even if there are English versions out there too. The director is Franz Antel and even if this is based on an Alexandre Dumas novel, the name Antel should tell you enough, especially in combination with the title, to tell you that this one here is not a film where you should have great expectation or even expect some kind of quality. The good news is that it is not as much pointless softcore porn as you could have thought, thae bad news is that even the better components like sets and costumes are mediocre at best. Luckily, the film stays under the 90-minute mark, so it is not a long watch by any means. The cast does not include any well-known names at all for me as a German audience member with the one exception of course that is Uschi Glas, but the quality of this film here is symbolic for a great deal of her body of work, stuff that simply isn't good and even if she may have been an icon in terms of her looks, she just isn't a particularly gifted actress in terms of range and probably never was. Well as for the story here, there isn't too much to say. Of course there are many sexual references as there is a tower of lust in the center of it all, but well the character writing and plot writing really makes you just want to look away on many occasions. What else can you say about this one. It is not possibly to take this film seriously from any perspective, not as a drama because that's what it tries to be the most, not as a historic movie or even period piece and not as a fantasy film either. It is not bad/entertaining enough to be a guilty pleasure or to be so bad that it is good again in a funny way. It is just very medicore and forgettable. i give it a thumbs-down overall because honestly pretty much everybody who worked on it seemed to not have contributed anything of quality or talent here. Watch something else instead. Final note: What the hell was that Blanche DuBois / Streetcar reference???

Tower of Screaming Virgins (1968) ** 1/2 (out of 4)Based on the Alexandre Dumas novel, this film tells the story of a Queen who has a lust for blood. Each night men are taken to a deadly tower and in the morning their bodies are discovered. One man decides he has had enough and plans to overthrow the Queen.This German film is certainly a very strange one. It has been released under a number of titles but its TOWER OF SCREAMING VIRGINS is perhaps the most infamous of the bunch. The film's title and promotional materials makes you think that you're walking into a Euro horror picture but that's not really the case. This here is basically a swashbuckler film that someone like Errol Flynn would have appeared in had he been the age he was when he did THE ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD. What sets the film apart from others in the genre is the fact that this one does feature horror and sleaze elements.The most surprising thing about this picture are some rather bloody and creative torture and death scenes as well as plenty of female nudity. This film certainly lived up to its reputation as being a rather dirty little picture adn this stuff certainly helps keep the film moving and entertaining. I think the film also deserves credit for having a nice atmosphere, some great costumes and I really liked the cinematography and look of the picture. All of these elements certainly make the film worth watching.At the same time, I found most of the story and most of the performances to be rather forgettable. Whenever something "dirty" wasn't happening the film really dragged. Still, with that being said, the flaws with the picture aren't great enough to keep people from checking it out.

Tagline: "Every man was theirs to command. Each night three more were summoned to the Tower to satisfy their lust. And still they hunger for more..." Alexandre Dumas' works are action-packed adventure tales that skillfully blend history with fiction -and this lively adaptation with its surfeit of sex & savagery has suffered in obscurity thanks to a sleazy ad campaign. Filmed internationally as "The Tower of Nesle", it was later changed to "Tower Of Screaming Virgins" and dumped on the U.S. drive-in/sexploitation circuit. Ironically, it turns that misogynistic genre on its ear. There are virgins (and yes, they scream!) but -they're all young MEN! The film is actually an erotically charged romantic thriller of French medieval times/crimes on a lavish scale -with abundant doses of murder, sexual debauchery, intrigue & skulduggery at the palace of Louis X.King's swordsman Captain Buridan, hero of the Flanders campaign, returns to Paris to find it in a grip of fear -a "vampire/witch" in the "Tower of Sin" is luring young men to their deaths by offering them a night of sexual ecstasy followed by savage slaughter: "You've had your fun -now its our turn!" Buridan is holding secrets of his own and his battle to save France from an evil Chancellor, an impotent King and a lascivious, wanton Queen make the battlefields of war seem like child's play. The killer may be a beautiful beast above the laws of man but finds she's not above poetic justice while the Musketeer saves the day for the French monarchy.The 1832 Dumas play/novel on which the film is based has a curious history of its own: Considered a masterpiece of French melodrama, it began as a five-act play by Frédéric Gaillardet but was given to Alexandre Dumas pere to rewrite. He rewrote it in two weeks, without credit, but the play was so successful that Dumas later decided to claim it. Gaillardet was upset and they fought a duel with pistols -but neither man hit the other. "La Tour de Nesle/Chamber of Death" tells of the murderous (and libidinous) Queen Marguerite of France in the 14th century who, purportedly, had handsome young newcomers to Paris picked up, brought to her tower on the banks of the Seine where she enjoys them for a night, then has them strangled and dumped in the river. She's had two sons by an earlier lover, who have been raised in the country not knowing who their mother is. Then they come to Paris as handsome young men –and that's only the beginning..." The film, and possibly the Dumas saga, finds its inspiration not only in the life of Marguerite de Bourgogne (1290-1315) but in the notorious Hungarian Countess Erzebet Bathory (1560-1614). Marguerite, wife of Louis X, did take a lover and trysted in the Tower of Nesle but was no killer. When caught, she was imprisoned and her lover flayed alive before being beheaded and his genitals fed to the dogs. The cuckolded King divorced his Queen and she was "quietly suffocated" in her cell a few years later. The Transylvanian Countess Bathory, however, was not only inspiration for Bram Stoker's immortal "Dracula" (she was actually related to Vlad The Impaler by marriage) but (according to the Guiness Book of Records) was the most prolific serial killer of all time. The legend of "The Bloody Lady of Cachtice" has her bathing in her female victim's blood to retain her fabled beauty but in reality: "she may not have actually bathed in the blood of her servants, several accounts of her tortures described her as being so soaked with the blood of her victims that she had to change her clothes before continuing". Like "The Queen" in the Dumas, the "Blood Countess" was a sexual sadist who tossed the bodies of her victims over the parapets of her castle at dawn and had the entire countryside in a state of terror. Like the Dumas villianess, the lady was also too high-born to ever be brought to justice (her uncle was King of Poland) -the Countess was merely walled in the rooms of her castle so she couldn't get her hands on fine young flesh ever again: "Late in August of the year 1614 one of the Countess's jailers wanted to get a good look at her, since she was still reputedly one of the most beautiful women in Hungary. Peeking through the small aperture in her walled-up cell, he saw her lying face down on the floor...""The Tower Of Screaming Virgins" boasts enthusiastic performances from the leads, especially Jean Pait as the fearless Lothario "Buridan/Bourdonville" and voluptuous Terri Torday as his lover-turned-nemesis, "Milady, The Queen". When she rises nude from her bath, a young portrait painter gasps "I want to paint you as God made you!" She smiles and replies, "How do you know the Devil didn't make me?" There's non-stop love-making & swash-buckling sword-play with enough plot/sub-plot for five Dumas series-novels. The film benefits from nice production values and the capable direction/cinematography is highly atmospheric. It captures the tale's time and place perfectly, from the taverns & marketplaces of idyllic rural France to the opulence of Court chicanery -replete with towers, dungeons & double-crosses. Derring-do & duels to the death erupt every ten minutes or so and nearly every wench is willingly bedded. This adult tale doesn't stint with its more prurient aspects either -the (very) soft-core sex is reminiscent of Radley Metzger and the killings are tastefully graphic. All in all, a rousing good show and highly recommended! "Tower Of Screaming Virgins" would make a great double-feature with Jorge Grau's 1973 take on the Bathory myth, "Ceremonia Sangrienta", starring a former Miss Italy, Lucia Bose, as the blood-thirsty "Countess".In 1955, director Abel Gance made "La Tour De Nesle" as an epic color spectacle, casting anatomical wonder Silvana Pampanini (also a former Miss Italy) as the wicked "Milady".

This film is a crackerjack, at times rivetingly atmospheric con job of a mishmash of a film that defies convention so much that it is pimped as something it really isn't. The title and opening 10 minutes or so promise a sort of Edgar Wallace-like horror thriller about young men lured to their doom in a forbidden tower somewhere in France. There are hooded assassins, some surprisingly gory deaths, a bit of female nudity, and then the film shifts gears to become a swashbuckler right out of Alexandre Dumas -- who gets a writing credit -- concerning "The Hero of the Flanders Campaign" who has come back from chasing maidens around the countryside to engage in derring-do, righting wrongs, making the ladies swoon & the other swordsmen salute his valor, and above all serve his King.In other words this is a strange movie and I'm not surprised to look at the user ratings vote board and see an inordinate amount of 1 star ratings. That's probably because due to the Englicanized title TOWER OF SCREAMING VIRGINS, most of them gave it a look expecting atmospheric, lurid Euro Horror with 17 year old girls being torn from their clothes by satanists in red hoods for nefarious purposes. And the most notable name in the cast is Uschi Glass, best known for baring her wonderful body in various exploitation & horror epics from the 1970's.Instead, viewers find D'artangan's 3rd cousin doing the Errol Flynn bit. The best way to describe the film it is that it's a costume drama hybrid mixing horror, swashbuckling, palace intrigue and Three Muskateers flavored heroics. Nincompoops will be disappointed, but fans of *FILM* will find this to be an enjoyable hodgepodge that has a strange agenda. The Screaming Virgins of reference are young men, the film's sporadic & exploitational nudity and at times surprisingly graphic violence are too overboard for the younger audiences this kind of fare is usually aimed at, and the movie is filmed with a sort of ornate, Gothic/baroque production design is often reminiscent of a Harald Reinl or Adrian Hoven production. Misty, vaulted castle interiors with winding staircases to nowhere look like an Escher drawing, with swordfighters leaping from parapets instead of Count Dracula. The change of pace is most refreshing and I'd say this is one of the most interesting genre films to come out of Continental Europe during the later 1960's. Seek it out, it's quite rare and worth more than one viewing, and you can't say that for a lot of movies with such a title.8/10