Director Jean Rollin plays a cameo as one of the Bog Squad’s victims.
Though flagrantly set in con- temporary times with contempo- rary dress, the story is set in an unspecified, evidently French vil- lage (possibly Holfen, the setting of some of Franco’s earliest hor- ror films, like THE SADISTIC BARON VON KLAUS, 1963) ten years after World War II. The vil- lage is known for its “Lac du maudit” or Lake of the Damned, whose isolation attracts various young women who go skinny- dipping there, alone or in num- bers, their thrashing limbs summoning various, green- faced undead Nazi soldiers (seemingly led by Franco regu- lar Antonio Mayans) to rise up, manhandle and drown them. As the film goes on, they start emerging from the lake and at- tacking women on dry land, wres- tling them to the ground and drinking their blood, or at least nuzzling and smearing it around. The dead women are carried (amusingly, it always takes three or four men to cart them about)
66
to the doorstep of the town’s mayor (Howard Vernon), who re- fuses to take action until a snoop- ing reporter named Katya Moore (Marcia Sharif) shows up, smell- ing more of a story than we do. She carries a history book to the Mayor’s castle-like home, but af- ter showing polite fascination with it, he returns it to her and shares the backstory, which con- tains a wealth of information he couldn’t possibly know: ten years ago, during the Nazi occupation, a young Nazi soldier (Pierre-Marie Escourrou) shielded a local woman (Nadine Pascal) from enemy gunfire; she nursed him back to health, rewarded him with her pendant and some hot sex, and he returned some months later to find her dying after giving birth to a daughter she named Helena; he left only to be shot to death with others in his company by the locals, led by the Mayor, and their bodies were dumped in the lake to avoid discovery by a coming visit of
German troops. Unbeknownst to the Mayor, the undead German soldier has fostered a sentimen- tal relationship with Helena (Anoushka), his now 10-year-old daughter, which becomes an important factor in their ultimate destruction. Rollin, billed under his own name in an “and” acting credit, appears briefly as Inspec- tor Spitz, likely named after the Olympic multi-gold medallist who won seven medals for com- petitive swimming in 1972, a record as yet unequalled at the time the film was made. French writer, musician and critic Alain Petit is also briefly visible in the finale, as the contemporary vil- lagers repeat history by taking up arms against the zombies. One can’t help wondering what sort of film might have re- sulted under Franco’s control. A similar lake figured poetically in his 1971 film A VIRGIN AMONG THE LIVING DEAD, and he returned to the notion of Nazi zombies with OASIS OF THE
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