The Deathhead Virgin (1974)

the audience applauded

As somebody who had not heard any of this before, it became a curious phenomenon to sit and watch a film and slowly have the realities begin to click into place.

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

Excellent characters with emotional depth. My wife, daughter and granddaughter all enjoyed it...and me, too! Very good movie! You won't be disappointed.

According to IMDb the plot of "The Deathhead Virgin" goes like that:a treasure hunter Jock Gaynor finds a sunken Spanish galleon off the coast of a Philippine island.What he doesn't know is that the ship is guarded by the spirit of an ancient Moro princess-the titular Deathhead Virgin.When Jock removes an amulet from around her bleached skeleton she returns to life.The local legend states that once the Deathhead Virgin is coming back from her watery grave seven virgins must be ritually sacrificed.The action of "The Deathhead Virgin" moves at snail's pace,the acting is amateurish and there is almost no suspense.Sunny Philippine locations are nice and there is a bit of naked flesh.Unfortunately "The Deathhead Virgin" looks cheap and tiresome.However this is perhaps the only one horror film I know that features a masked,harpoon-wielding,homicidal,aquatic and naked zombie girl.5 virgins out of 10.

Filipino horror films don't come much worse than this unbearably dull, drawn-out stiff which boasts a decent enough plot, but precious little energy in the telling of said story. In short, what we have here is a classic case of cruddy schlock movie-making that crucially lacks the necessary trashy vitality to pass muster as a fun, worthy fright flick. Jock Gaynor, who was also one of the co-producers ("A Taste of Hell" 's John Garwood was another one) and designed the many boring underwater sequences featured herein, listlessly plays a treasure-seeking deep sea diver who discovers a fabled 1850 sunken galleon which contains the corpse of a legendary Moro tribe virgin princess. When Gaynor steals a priceless amulet from the princess' skeletal remains, the skull-faced sea siren (the gorgeous Iraida Arambulo, who's naked throughout the entire film except for a hokey monster mask that covers her cadaverous face) comes back to life and forces Gaynor to kill seven virgins in order to appease the god that the princess was sacrificed to a century earlier.Despite a goodly serving of both gratuitous nudity and bloody violence, plus the enticing sight of sexy female leads Diane McBain and Kim Ramos walking about in skimpy bikinis, "The Deathhead Virgin" proves to be a static, lifeless, sleep-inducing waste of time thanks to Norman Foster's drab direction (Foster, who started out as an actor prior to becoming a director, had a very uneven career which includes several episodes of Disney's "Davy Crockett" series), Fredy Conde's clunky, grainy cinematography, Ward Gaynor's arid, dead obvious, gab-ridden script, such excessive padding as tacky night club scenes, a horrible comic sequence in which Gaynor and his fellow diver buddy Larry Ward get drunk together on the beach, and a cock fight, the pitiful wasting of the great Vic Diaz in the nothing role of an investigating police chief who tries to piece together the whole fantastic story in a logical manner (Vic does what he can with a thankless part, but even he's let down by lousy dubbing -- some drip with a flat, hollow tenor substitutes for Diaz's wonderfully ripe and oily baritone!), cheesy solarization effects, uniformly indifferent performances from an understandably out of it cast, and Richard La Salle's slushy, overbearing score. So bad that it doesn't even qualify as enjoyable junk, this terribly lame loser of a flick should be avoided at all costs.

1970's Filipino made horror is an acquired taste, and I must admit not getting it. THE DEATHHEAD VIRGIN is about on par with DAUGHTERS OF Satan, low budget potboilers set in the Philipines for the cynical reason that it was cheaper to make the movie there than anywhere else. The story idea is not without merit: Damned soul of a virgin girl sunk with a galleon comes back to haunt the beaches and resort communities leased by the film company for their off-season shoot. She walks around wearing a mask and not much else, thought strategic hair placement keeps whatever nudity there was from sullying our eyes.The problem is that not much happens, and other than some interesting slow speed filming and some interesting underwater photography the movie exists without the thrill factor needed to make something like this work. I bailed out at like the 70 minute point when like another commenter I realized that the director had reached his conclusion at about 62 minutes but exposed a bunch of other footage & felt compelled to use it, probably because he had to. Just ask The Beatles; Those Filipino entertainment unions can be murder.One curious footnote about the movie is the opening titles. At roughly thirteen minutes into the feature the words DIRECTED BY NORMAN FOSTER flash onto the screen, producing the film's only genuine laugh. My guess is that Mr. Foster had just seen ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST, who's titles go on for about three quarters of an hour. The difference of course is that they were not arbitrarily inserted by an editor who probably never saw the finished result. I don't blame him.

*Minor spoilers*Unrenowned U.S./Phillipines co-venture involves an ancient sunken vessel being found by divers. Inside the ship is a treasure, as well as the manacled skeleton of a princess. When the skeleton is heedlessly released from it's chains, the bones transform into a naked girl wearing an ugly witch mask over her face. As you've probably guessed, nearby island natives begin to die mysteriously, and some suspect that the ages-old curse of the Deathhead Virgin is to blame. Things aren't necessarily all that they seem, however, as the story takes some hairpin turns during the final-third.THE DEATHHEAD VIRGIN is a fairly watchable and not inefficiently formulated low-budget horror-drama(and Diane McBain is gorgeous in a slingshot bikini). Still, there's nothing of any real distinction to make this recommendable(unless your dying to see what is possibly the world's longest spread of opening credits). It's not at all a good film, but it is a wee bit better than I had anticipated. With the immense volume of worthwhile cinema to be watched, why would you make time for something like this? 4/10