BY ITS very nature, this column has dealt with more than its fair share of ‘so bad it’s good’ films down the years, but Bluebeard might just take the ultimate ‘most fun you can have watching a God awful piece of cinematic trash’ award all for itself.
A shameless vanity project for everyone’s favourite scenery crunching Welsh rarebit, Richard Burton, Bluebeard dates from 1972, a time when the actor’s career was in freefall, and charts the depths to which a once proud Thespian ravaged by alcohol and ego will sink in order to keep the whisky on the table.
As the film publicity rather needlessly roared at the time, “Burton Is Bluebeard” and he certainly gives his all as Baron Von Sepper, the Austrian aristocrat noted for his insatiable appetite for the ladies and his blue-tinted beard.
To say he goes over-the-top in this French, Italian and German co-production is an understatement of gargantuan proportions: Burton chows down on every inch of celluloid here like a man possessed.
Describing just how mad Bluebeard actually is when viewed in 2024 is practically impossible, but let’s have a go, shall we? It’s a sleazy sex comedy with strong Giallo overtones and the overall vibe of a tasteless 1970s Euro horror film that doesn’t have a clue when to draw the line. Yes, Bluebeard is garish, gruesome and completely devoid of decency. It is, in other words, utterly awful, but simultaneously hugely entertaining all the same.
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Freshly released on Blu-ray by Imprint, it tells the tale of the title character in flashback as we learn of his string of failed marriages to some of the most beautiful women in Europe. Rather than simply divorce his many partners, Bluebeard decides instead to kill them via eccentric methods that include decapitation, shooting, suffocation and - no, I’m not making this up - death by hunting falcon.
When his eighth wife (played by Hollywood sex siren Joey Heatherton) arrives on the scene, he hands her the keys to his fancy castle with the one proviso that she doesn’t ever use the golden one. Inevitably, the golden key is immediately used, and what she finds when she turns it in the lock is a walk-in freezer now playing host to his ex-wives in all their bloody glory.
How will she outwit the beardy psycho in her marriage bed? Well that’s the story that director Edward Dmytryk tries to tell ,although mostly he seems to get waylaid by all the endless nudity and softcore sex scenes unfolding all around him.
While Burton plays it all like high art, the female figures on show here - who include Virna Lisi, Sybil Danning and, perhaps most unforgettably, Raquel Welch as a naughty nun, all come across as more wooden as a Thunderbirds’ wardrobe.
The soundtrack is delivered by Ennio Morricone, which only adds to the early-70′s sense of effortless Eurotrash on show.
Even at that, Bluebeard is still a heady brew of exploitation and excess that’s just begging to lure you into a late night viewing this weekend.
Just make sure you give yourself a good long cold shower straight afterwards.
