Reviews

Markets of horror ideas move forward by bringing in discredited scholarly ideas, urban legends and the latest news. I've always suspected that the right turn in horror from lone psychos to satanic cults around about 1970 was motivated by fears aroused by the Manson Murder of Sharon Tate. Freda makes explicit reference to the similarity between Tate and the eight dead bodies in a mansion visited by a group of what are called hippies, though hair over the ear and a silk shirt does not a hippie make, when they watch the news on TV afterwards. Clearly then the movie implicates the innocent stumblers upon a satanic coven as guilty by association to what was going on in the news. Other than the frisson of a script trying to tease a story out of that possibility, however, this movie is pretty flat. Even the satanic rituals, though stylishly grounded in suits of armor, family crests, black everything, censers with airborne hallucinogens, and a helter skelter riot of murder, are bit odd. The setpiece of the movie is one acolyte getting his head sliced in half, and with a flashback we see that lovely moment five times. The connecting link is that the girl of the hippie group, played with eery awkwardness by waspy Camille Keaton, after they get in out of the rain at the castle, is lured by cellar chanting wetbreasted out of her bath and ends up horizontal under a sacrificial knife. The shot when she descends a grand staircase in steely blue billowing with stormtossed curtains communicates the terrible threshold (repeating an equally impressive grand staircase initiation shot in the same year's All the Colors of the Dark). The escape sequence , which also involves some deaths, is explained at the end. The chief priestess (Luciana Paluzzi) was stabbed, and is dying, but that is the point when extrasensory perception in a medium is at the utmost, allowing her spirit to jump into Keaton's body and then through Keaton have revenge and then when Keaton finally dies she is reborn. Why, this comes straight out of authentic Euro folklore going back to the third century, again explaining why its important to watch Italian horror. The fact that the movie is putatively set in Anglo Saxon locales such as Chelsea and that Scotland Yard shows up, when everything is obviously rural Italian, suggests how very strong the pull of Hammer England was to all Euro horror then (see also Seven Deaths in a Cats Eye).

This is a high-grade example of all of the movies that came out excitedly influenced by Roman Polanskis Rosemarys Baby, which should be seen before viewing this one. It's a very similar story, though the only baby involved is lost by miscarriage. Sergio Martino botches the satanic ritual scenes, Euro movies always seemed to have to make Satan into a goatish Baphometan pretty boy, and hes pretty weak here, but he beautifully expands the menace in the recruiting part and then the escape from the cult part of the basic story (both involving being stalked by Ivan Rassimov). Edwige Fenech (whom I found trivial and overly enamored of herself in Strip Nude For your Killer) is quite effective as a very troubled woman who actually submits to going to a Sabbath as if to therapy, and to being group groped and more by pastyfaced acolytes, but then balks disgusted at having to ritually kill her friend Mary, because in an interesting twist now that Mary has recruited her, she is free to leave (meaning this life). Fenech is apparently famous for her physique aka great sloping breasts but its mostly her Venus reclining profile that caught audiences eyes and she exploits that to the full here by appearing often reclining in bed or crouching in corners on floors, though there is only modest nudity. And yet she spends most of her time in bed suffering, sex with her husband is so unsatisfactory to her (except once) that one suspects him of not good things. Martino seemed most excited by Mia Farrows exclamation in RB that this is not a dream, this is really happening, and uses what the dumb American trailer called Chillorama otherwise known as wide angle shots to blur reality and paranoid fantasy in a way that does unnerve. He also makes great symbolic use of the old apartment bloc including its roof, a great English castle and its grounds (a chase scene reminiscent of Demon of the Night) and London (its interesting how the legacy of Hammer satanism from Witchcraft all the way to Satanic Rites of Dracula turned England into the land of horror so that even Italian directors felt they had to shoot there (see also Seven Deaths in a Cats Eye) to reinforce the blurring.

This is not a horror movie, beyond the borderline of horror, though I watched it to trace Camille Keatons drift away from and out of horror. She was in What have you Done to Solange and Fredas Tragic Ceremony of 1972, and a few others, but this is six years later and something has changed. From being the very icon of fragile awkward vulnerable teenage beauty she now gives off that aloof sense of self-possession bordering on smugness that of course irritates most humanity like hell. The effect is completely different, and changes ones feelings about her. The movie is mainly a painfully prolonged almost documentary back and forth of rape and revenge. The rape scene is actually three scenes in which Keaton is reduced to a pulp. This involves some very graphic stuff which startles one because it is the very opposite of pornography as her bruised nakedness becomes a sign of abject victimhood that should make you sick (if it doesn't, you might have a problem, and the fact that her husband directed the movie has to be considered very strange). That is, there is no nudity per se in the movie, its all violated nakedness which goes beyond horror into straight crime. And then rather implausibly she stays put in her cottage, pulls herself together, and then enacts a four stage revenge sequence in which she uses sex and seduction as a lure (no posttraumatic stress disorder here) then hangs and castrates (as part of a handjob) two rapists, axing and drowning two others. By the way, all the men are laughable Italian stereotypes of backwoods Americans (I mean would you take a bath with a woman who half an hour before had pointed a gun at your privates). Keaton gives a little smirk of satisfaction at the end of the movie, but you wont be smiling. In this movie, she has lost a sense of the limitations placed upon her as an actress by her peculiar body, resulting in something, but its hardly a movie.

Recommended to see this one after one has screened Rosalba Neri in Lady Frankenstein and Slaughter Hotel, so one gets a sense of what a standout she remains in such a paltry production. Italian horror seemed obsessed with jazzy mod bare-midriffed bellbottomed Italian gals peeking into musty old Gothic castles lorded over by dirty old men (The Devil's Wedding Night, The Playgirls and the Vampire, Tomb of Torture, The Bloody Pit of Horror), and as in so many of those movies Neri finds she looks exactly like a former countess in a Cormanesque style portrait. But then the movie flashes back and spends the whole movie in the flashback, making it almost a quaint historical drama. Much of the telling of the story is beyond tedious, all but unwatchable, Neri steals Hans from another local girl, but it gets interesting again when a demon gets a glimpse at Neri's wedding dress, violating a taboo that results in an evil spell being cast upon her. She has to go see a witch who tells her to go pray to the moon goddess Selene on hanged man hill in the company of two virgins for intercession, but before she can complete the lunar cleansing of her gown the virgins get scared and run off, only to be abducted by cavedwelling Neanderthal rapists who force them into a nude orgy. This leaves Neri catatonic throughout her wedding and reception dinner, and she even (as in Lady Frankenstein) commits another atrocity in bed, running off to be with Satan, rolling under an altar with him in the (pretty PG-rated) nude, mainly shot to show off her remarkable backside, shoulders on down. Satan attempts to be dashing, I know its an urban legend but it never works. If you can adjust your TV set to the idea that these low-budget Gothic tales were told in the stilted manner of dramatizations in documentaries like you would see on the History channel today, and not through real theatrical acting, then the fact that the movie appears to be based on authentic Euro folklore and is not just another teens getting slashed black box makes it an interesting document of the kind of haunted ideas Italian horror was toying with back then. If you're not interested in Neri or folklore, pass on by.

This one seems to pick up on the Bavaesque idea to stage a psychothriller in a lavish but rundown Roman villa—a terrific set with a labyrinthan Orson Wellesian quality--and includes some chase scenes reminiscent of Bava too. The plot involves Sergio answering a want ad for a scholar to reorganize an old library (as in the Hammer Dracula), by an old women and her here-one-minute-gone-the-next, and extremely beautiful daughter. The main problem is it took me about five minutes to figure out what was going on, then I had to sit through another 90 minutes of Richard Johnson not being able to figure what it all meant. Let's see, a reclusive old woman, rare flowers, magic tea, dead cats, a daughter who only appears now and then, then mimics the gestures of the old woman. And yet he just doesn't get it. It's OK when horror movie characters are a bit dumb, but to be utterly clueless stretches one's patience. This movie also blundered badly by trying to fill up a horror movie framework with psychological thriller soap-opera argumentations ad infinitum and, some of which, involving a male librarian already trapped in the old women's employ, are unwatchably tedious (had to hit the fast forward button a few times). Here and there, some sequences work, like when Johnson has to remove Aura's dress no hands allowed, or a very weird bathing sequence or the final scene, but generally a fatal case of genre confusion. Not watchable except for spelunkers after Italian movie witches (but this one is far downhill from Argento's Suspira and even the fairy tale witches in movies like Lucifera).

This is clearly a movie of emulation, the producer or director were excited by what Hammer, Coreman and Bava were up to right about 1958-1960, and threw their hat into the ring. As a result, most of the auteur elements are imitative, but very good imitations! Two fabulous tableaux, both in a hallucination sequence, Elfi, the sick daughter, rising from her deathbed, and later her hands extended out of a heavy curtain. Otherwise, 50s horror was studio-stylish , with storybook quality production design, and plots well-constructed and quickly dispatched: this one holds up to the standard. As to the theme: An older artist living in a mill with a wax museum-like carousel in it outside of a Dutch town tends to his very ill daughter in a very creative way (not unlike in Barbara Steele's Nightmare Castle). Mad scientists are great, but, for me, mad artists are even better. Stories where the veneer of art is torn off by the psychosis of the artist represent true horror: they throw us back upon very primitive fears of representation. In one scene cut from the print (see the French clip in the extras), a young lady mentions that as a child she thought merry go round figures had real dwarfs inside. Later, she screams and faints when the sculptural figures of the artist's great-grandfather's carousel, featuring Joan of Arc etc, go too Gothic. The dread that there is something more going on in the artist's life than art fuels a terrific story too. In exploring this territory, the movie joins Mystery of the Wax Museum and House of Wax, though the fiery finale of burning statues, a direct homage to House of Wax, is actually a bit chillier. By the way, Elfi is played by Scilla Gabel, with a 41' bust, and Dany Carrell's nipple slip during her transfusion crisis was said by the production notes to launch the "sex horror film" genre. It's a surprise, especially since no one in the story says a word about it (while House of Wax had to laugh off embarrassment at its unseen nudity).