By Richard Winters
My Rating: 4 out of 10
4-Word Review: Witnessing a black mass.
Jane (Camille Keaton), Joe (Maximo Valverde), Bill (Tony Isbert), and Fred (Giovanni Petrucci) are four young adult friends traveling the Spanish countryside in their uncovered jeep. When their car runs out of gas they come upon a large estate whose owner, Lord Alexander (Luigi Pistilli) allows them to stay in order to seek shelter from the rain. During the course of the night Jane starts to hear strange music and chanting coming from another room and when she enters it, she finds a group of people performing a satanic ritual. Jane then realizes she’s the one chosen to be sacrificed, but before they can do it her friends come in to save her, but this leads to more violence and the four attempting to flee only to be followed by grisly mayhem wherever they go.
Unusual horror opus starts out almost like a dreamy romance with the four riding on a sailboat and soft melodic song played over the credits. The scares and tension don’t come quickly, and the first act has a relaxed direction that doesn’t grab the viewer and is too leisurely paced. The ceremony scenes are done with no imagination and seems to bask in every cliche making it more appropriate for parody. Director Riccardo Freda complained that the project was taken out of his hands and scenes added in by the producer to bolster the runtime. It took all the way until 2004 when a full restoration of the director’s cut was finally made available, but when this got shown at the 61st Venice International Film Festival it was met at the end by a chorus of boos.
The main reason to catch it is for the performance of Camille Keaton. This was the last Italian feature that she was in before moving back to the states and starring in I Spit on Your Grave, of which she’s best known for. Even here though her presence is a bit distorted as she looks beautiful and has a really good topless moment in the bathtub, but her voice gets dubbed by an Italian woman who sounds middle-aged and therefore doesn’t reflect something coming from a delicate young lady that she is.
It’s also never explained why she’s traveling with three guys as normally there should be other female friends riding along in order to keep it an even mix. One lady with a bunch of guys doesn’t make much sense unless she was dating one of them, though that’s not the way it gets portrayed. She does at one point sleep with one of them to the envy of the others, but it’s deemed as a ‘one-off’ moment, which proceeds to make the interpersonal dynamics in the group even more murky and confusing. The guys on the other hand show very little distinction in their personalities and it would’ve worked better had it been simply a couple and let the other two guys written out of it completely.
Once the violence gets going it is rather impressive in a gory sort of way. The ax cutting through someone’s head was startling, but then the same shot gets replayed 5 different times, as part of a reoccurring nightmare sequence, that makes it very redundant. A good director, even if they are going to show a past event, will, or should, do it from a different angle, or in slow motion, or even an alternative color scheme in order to change it up a bit and not make it seem repetitive and in this case amateurish.
Spoiler Alert!
The twist ending in which the wife of the homeowner and leader of the black mass ritual, Lady Alexander (Luciana Paluzzi) appears to have completely taken over Jane’s identity to the point that Jane becomes her as the car she’s riding in drives away, which I thought was kind of cool. Granted it does leave open many questions, but I felt a level of mystery in this case helped. Unfortunately producer Jose Gutierrez Maesso, didn’t like this approach as he thought it would cause the viewer too much confusion, so he hired actor Paul Muller to play a psychiatrist who would enter at the very end and essentially explain away all of the loose ends, but this treats the audience like they’re too stupid to figure things out on their own.
My Rating: 4 out of 10
Released: December 20, 1972
Runtime: 1 Hour 22 Minutes
Not Rated
Director: Riccardo Freda
Studio: Variety Distribution
Available: DVD, Blu-ray, Tubi
Scopophilia 