Here’s a wander through my thoughts on The Loreley’s Grasp, directed by Amando De Ossorio who also made Tombs of the Blind Dead and Demon Witch Child. If you’re into quirky Euro horror of the 70s, you will like this movie. If you’re not, you can view it as a massive WTF-ery. Listen to my informal monologue podcast on YouTube, or scroll down to read the transcript.

The Loreley is a river monster.

This movie was made in Spain, but it’s set in Germany. She comes out of the Rhine River, turns into a green monster, and she rips out people’s hearts.

And there is a bard, a blind violin player who’s going around and telling everyone about the Loreley. And then there’s a scientist, and that’s my favorite part. I say over and over again, there’s a [ __ ] science element to this film, which can’t be defined by science.

What he’s managed to learn with his room full of scientific equipment that does nothing is that there’s a knife that can kill this Loreley, which is centuries and probably millennia old, because at the end she brings in Valhalla and some Norse mythology when you finally get the lore.

So this scientist has got a knife that can kill her but he doesn’t use it when she comes.

She’s got a human henchman. This is unusual. Usually if you have a cryptid, even if it’s a person turning into a werewolf, they’re not aware of what they’re doing when they’re killing. The Loreley is very aware.

She comes and kills the bard because he’s telling her story. She comes and kills the scientist, or rather she has her Igor-type guy to kill him while she burns his paperwork on a Bunsen burner.

How would she know how to use a Bunsen burner when she lives in a river?

Uh, these are the things that you just shouldn’t think about.

The center of this story, such as it is, is that in this town that’s being plagued by the Loreley, there’s a girl’s boarding school, but you don’t see them do any school. They mostly swim in a pool.

It must be a heated pool because when the people in the town are talking outside, you can see their breaths. So, it’s cold.

But these girls spend all their time in the pool and the school has a matron who’s kind of understanding and then an under-boss who’s very uptight.

And they hire this great hunter to come and kill the Loreley. And you can tell he’s a great hunter because he’s got a tight white leisure suit made of denim and he’s got a tight brown leisure suit made of velour.

And he makes the girls go crazy.

And the uptight underling boss of the school is obviously attracted to him in the way that makes her be rude to him and say that he’s got to sleep in a moldy garage and he can’t swim in the pool with the girls because it wouldn’t be proper.

And this drives him right into the arms of the Loreley because he’s like, fine, I’ll go swim over here in the river.

He walks over there and he meets the Loreley in her riverweed bikini.

And this movie, if I had to get symbolic about it, water represents women’s sexuality. This movie is full of water. You’ve got a big river, a grotto where the Loreley and her Igor and three other women live, the pool, and a bathtub that some of the students are getting sort of sapphic in.

They don’t really mind that they’re kept away from men and this hunter because they’re just going to do it with each other, which is fine.

It’s a movie about sexual frustration.

The Loreley starts getting together with the hunter and he takes off this necklace that she’s wearing, after which she either gets really excited or starts dying. I’m not sure which.

But then her Igor comes along and carries her away before she can have sex with the hunter.

The Loreley kills a bride on the night before her wedding who’s standing at her window.

The Loreley would like to take a human lover forever and ever, but what we’re told is that they keep getting old and dying. So, it’s all about frustration.

There’s some gore with close-ups of the hearts being torn out. There’s some of just the Loreley wiping blood on people instead of actually slashing them with her claws.

There’s a not bad scene towards the end of her transforming from a woman into the Loreley. You got to love the stop-motion monster transformation scenes.

I like to read Wikipedia when I’m watching a movie. I like to follow the plot. Whoever had last edited this one said there was a horde of women under the river with the Loreley, but they spelled it H-O-A-R-D.

So I went in because anyone can edit Wikipedia and I changed it to H-O-R-D-E. A horde of women.

But then it got to that part of the movie and there wasn’t a horde of women. There were only three women.

But they were hoarding treasures and gold that they had stolen from all the sailors that they had killed over the millennia.

So maybe that’s where the confusion was.

Maybe check out The Loreley’s Grasp if you also are into the je ne sais quoi of European horror. It is on Tubi. If you like better movies, start with the Blind Dead series by Amando de Ossorio. Specifically, the second one in the series, I think, is the best.

Stay out of the water.