The Tortuga Lot

'Twas the year 1961 and director Robert D. Webb ruthlessly plundered the footage of older pirate films to make the mild, stage bound adventure called Pirates of Tortuga. Yet Webb did shoot some decent sword fights for the film and some of the performances are terrific, though not necessarily extraordinary.

Most memorable is Italian actress Leticia Roman as Meg, a hastily conceived Moll Flanders pastiche. Captain Bart (Ken Scott) rescues her from a mob after she's caught pick-pocketing. She repays him by stowing away on his ship and taking a bath in his cabin. Then she changes into one of the many expensive dresses he has in one of his sea chests. Why is his sea chest filled with women's clothes and jewellery? This is never addressed.

All the men are wearing little tricorne hats so I figured it was set in the 18th century but then Bart gets orders from Charles II to track down Henry Morgan. My guess is Webb just didn't want his guys wearing big Restoration wigs. But that's not all the monkeying he did with historical accuracy. In this timeline, Henry Morgan has turned pirate again after being appointed governor of Jamaica.

Dave King is pretty entertaining in the film as one of Bart's officers called Pee Wee and there's a memorable scene of him giving fencing instructions to members of the crew. A lot of time is wasted on recycled footage, though. A bear fighting scene is taken from Anne of the Indies and several shots come from The Black Swan for ship exteriors. Since those older movies were shot in 4:3 and Pirates of Tortuga is a wide Cinemascope picture, all the old footage is obtrusively blurry and cropped.

At least sets were built for the film but I'm pretty sure a lot of the same parts used for the streets of London were reused for this film's really unremarkable looking Tortuga.

A Disconnected Web of Shadows

A beautiful young American tourist witnesses a murder in Rome. Perhaps. It's hard to say what's really happening in Mario Bava's preposterous 1963 film The Girl Who Knew Too Much ( La ragazza che sapeva troppo), aka The Evil Eye. But it sure is beautiful.

Italian actress Leticia Roman plays the tourist, Nora, and American actor John Saxon plays her Italian love interest, Marcello. Like most Italian films from the period, a lot of the stars aren't speaking the same language and everyone's dubbed.

One night, Nora's mugged and, lying dazed on the ground, she witnesses a woman being stabbed. Everyone says it's her imagination because she has a habit of reading pulp murder novels. Later in the film, a neurosurgeon she meets at dinner explains that she must have had a vision of a murder that had occurred ten years earlier. He says it like it's the most natural thing in the world. And that's one of the more sensible scenes in the film.

It's a serial killer targeting victims who line up alphabetically--first a victim whose name began with A, then one whose name began with B, then one whose name began with C. Now it's Nora's turn because her last name is Davis (Drowson in the cut called Evil Eye). When the killer's revealed, it makes absolutely no sense of the clues that had led up to the reveal, particularly a fantastically creepy scene where Nora wanders into an apartment of white walls and bare, swinging light bulbs.

Bava brings the visuals to be sure. There are so many gorgeous shots of Roman.

And a few nice ideas, like when Nora decides to make a spider-web of yarn to frustrate any intruders.

If only the writing matched the visuals. Well, I guess it all kind of works in a sort of dream logic way.

The Girl Who Knew Too Much/Evil Eye is available on Shudder.