Screen Captures of the Day - Ceremonia Sangrienta (1973)

When you wait years to see a movie, the expectations bar gets set pretty high, and a middling first reaction is almost a given, especially since this one was crafted by the magic fingers that made Let Sleeping Corpses Lie (aka The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue), one of the best 70s zombie oddballers ever. See this Beware of The Blog post for my take on how Sleeping Corpses figures in the classic zombie-film pantheon. (Make sure to check out the zombie-sharkfight animated .gif in that post—my first animated .gif ... sigh.)

European horror directors loved to mine the Erzebet Bathory legend for exploitation fodder (see Walerian Borowczyk's odd and brutal Bathory segment in Immoral Tales, or Harry Kümel's Daughters of Darkness), and kooky Spaniard Jorge Grau was no exception.

Ceremonia Sangrienta is well-stocked with gothic settings and beautiful women, so depending on your needs of the moment, that may be enough. It does get rocking in the closing 35-40 minutes with bloodlettings aplenty and visions of the dead (see top.) I know I'll like this one even better the second time around.