In 2009, Paul Naschy died. For those to whom the name means nothing, I can only state that you were not around in the 1970s, when he was, to foreign horror films, what Christopher Lee, Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, and Lon Chaney, were to English language horror. I exclude Vincent Price because, well, Price was in a league of his own.
Most of his films were filled with soft core porno, as well as horror, and in this way they parodied the Eurotrash films of haughtier filmmakers like Pier Paolo Pasolini and Luis Bunuel. There was no place for pretension in Naschy's films.
My pals and I would sneak into theaters, and get high watching his films, along with the stuff released by Hammer, Roger Corman, Ray Harryhausen, and the Godzilla film series. Occasionally, we'd even go in for a blaxploitation or martial arts film.
Naschy often scripted his own films, and if there was one flaw to them it was that he never quite succeeded in making them as memorably bad as the films of Ed Wood. Perhaps had he not acted in them he would have acheived this. But, he was a damned fine actor. No, the Oliviers of the world will not have to roll over in their graves, but outside of the aforementioned Vincent Price, few actors in the horror genre were capable of bringing in a gravitas to their roles, no matter how silly.
Naschy did, and his work, while largely forgotten on this side of the Atlantic, did push boundaries and meld genres like few before. And, it's worth noting that he did this before the slasher film genre took off in the late 1970s. That genre, in fact,owes a debt to Naschy, as a pioneer, and one who mixed horror and sex better than any of those genre films did.
It's a little late, but R.I.P. Jacinto Molina Álvarez (aka Paul Naschy).
