The Red-Stained Lawn (1973): or, The Days of Wine and Robots

How do you know when it's love?

Is it that first surreptitious glance across the room, eyes meeting over swirls of cigarette smoke and strains of Wagner thumping in your ears? Is it those first furtive, fleshy fumblings in the alley behind the bar, all hands and lips and straps with complicated fasteners? Or does it come later, reclining comfortably on the couch in a shared apartment, sharing a bottle of wine and your last cigarette as you wait patiently for the next episode of Cupcake Wars to roll?

It's a mystery, parishioners.

But even though I can't say exactly when or how it happens, I know that love is real. I know because I've found it, a love that asks for nothing and gives everything. I've found it in
Riccardo Ghione's 1973 hippie-abducting, mad science-spouting, blood-bottling, ultra-groovy mad movie bonanza, The Red-Stained Lawn (Il Prato Macchiato di Rosso).

Let me tell you a little something about that girl o'mine.

Really. I insist.

We open with a hard-boiled UNESCO agent (Nino Castelnuovo) investigating what appears to be a wine-smuggling operation on the Mediterranean coast. Easily swiping a crate of contraband from a couple of very task-focused smugglers, he makes a disturbing discovery: the bottles in the box are not your run-of-the-mill Chianti, but are instead filled to the cork-line with human blood! Duly alerted, he scuttles off to headquarters to inform his superiors about this unprecedented threat to the reputation of Italian wines worldwide.

Meanwhile, in Piacenza, good Samaritan and Daniel Craig-lookalike Alfiero (Claudio Biava) travels every highway and byway in his BOSS powder-blue sports car, searching for walkabouts who look as though they might fancy a lift. He has no trouble, as the northern Italian town is apparently crawling with automotively challenged individuals of every stripe. Within moments he's picked up a flower-selling Gypsy (Barbara Marzano), a Drunken Tramp (Lucio Dalla), a modestly priced Hooker (Dominique Boschero), and young hippie couple Max and "Max's Companion" (George Willing and a stunningly afro'd Daniela Caroli). Being the accomodating sort, he invites each passenger to come back to his sister's palatial estate, to drink their wine, eat their food, and set a spell. All for free! Now just what kind of paranoid, ungrateful monster would turn down an offer like that? 

At the mansion, the guests are introduced to the lady of the house, Nina Genovese (Marina Malfatti), and her eccentric, science-enthusiast husband, Antonio (Enzo Tarascio). Through a series of rapid-fire and not-at-all suspicious questions, Nina quickly determines that none of her visitors have any friends, family, or employers who will be looking for them, nor have they informed any outside parties as to their current whereabouts. Which simplifies things, of course--I mean, you wouldn't want to set the table for eight and then have a dozen show up, would you? Particularly if any of the extras were police. Not that they would be, for any reason. Hey, did you check out our freaky robot statue in the corner over there?

"Pericolo, Guglielmo Robinson!"

It doesn't take long for the quintet to make themselves at quite at home. The Tramp displays his frankly amazing wine-drinking skills: not only does he down bottle after bottle with no apparent ill effects, he makes it interesting for the viewer by balancing one canister on his head between gulps, carrying on a conversation with his beverage, and at one point getting the alcohol into his system faster by pouring the wine directly into his eye! That's more than alcoholism, that's showmanship!

The Hooker, meanwhile, splays herself languidly on every available piece of furniture, regaling the group with unashamed tales of tricks gone by. The Gypsy steals a few unguarded knick-knacks, as is the custom of her people, and Max and his Hot Mama drape their bedroom with scarves and burn some incense before lighting up a truly monstrous spliff. The Genovese Estate is thus a hedonistic oasis, a sort of "Pleasure Island" where everyone does what he wants and there's never any price to be paid. Or...IS THERE?!?!*

*Nota bene: there is.

He never takes "no" for an answer.

Unfortunately it's true that nothing good lasts forever (q.v., parachute pants, jelly shoes, Slim Whitman's career), and before long some strange, slightly sinister things are happening in Chez Boom-Boom. First, the Tramp and Max discover the Gypsy girl tied naked to her bed with her mouth duct-taped shut--a circumstance that does not inspire quite the sense of alarm in them that you might expect. Later the hippies, going against type and availing themselves of a hot shower, are moderately surprised when the water suddenly changes to a torrent of wine--though again, not so much as you'd imagine. Even when Max and Maxine rake the coals in the estate's furnace and find a nearly complete human skull, their only reaction is to come back inside and have a bit of "the sex." Which normally I'd agree is a fine solution for any problem, but this is looking to be a special case.

The only guest who keeps his wits about him is, paradoxically, the Drunken Tramp, who eventually confronts the master of the house with his suspicions. Turns out, Antonio Genovese is more than just an eccentric benefactor to the Italian unwashed--he's a MAD SCIENTIST! And it has to be said, one of the most fabulous mad scientists in cinematic history. Don't believe me? Just take a look at this selection of dominant, scientific neckwear:

"To do: buy more wine..."

"No no, I'm sorry...but you may not touch the cravat."

"What? Have I got something on my face?"

"This one's actually a Steinkirk, only tied like a cravat. See the difference?"

It takes a lot to draw the attention away from his wife's boobs, but I think Antonio has nailed it.

If that's not a man who's getting ready to take over the world, then I've never seen one.

So yes, there's evil-doings afoot in the mansion, and as the guest list grows smaller and smaller, Max & Co. grow more and more troubled. Actually, scratch that--they're not troubled at all! The Gypsy's disappearance merits barely a nod, and when even his best friend the Tramp vanishes, all Max can deduce is that the Genoveses are kinky voyeurs who like to watch smelly hippies getting it on. Though to be fair, it's clear that the hosts are more than a little freaky-deaky. Leaving aside Nina Genovese's more-than-fraternal closeness with Alfiero and her show-stopping psychedelic outfits (which are AMAZING--in fact the flick is worth seeing for the fashions alone), there's still the little matter of the doctor's...shall we say, interesting architectural choices.

"And this, my fwiends, is the Wumpus Womb!"

In case your eyes have refused to accept what they're seeing and have replaced the image above with one depicting My Little Ponies™ prancing around a daisy-strewn field, let me confirm that yes, that IS a giant vagina portal on the wall. (Because lord knows I'd hate for you to miss out on the subtlety and nuance of that image.) Leaping through the labia like Lilliputian lust-puppets, they find themselves in a huge mirrored room, where the Hooker immediately deduces she's been brought to perform the service for which she's been hired.

"Still, it beats diggin' ditches."

Alfiero breaks out a couple of bottles of champagne and Nina puts on some super-groovy music, encouraging the Hippy/Hooker trio to agitate that with which their Mamas equipped them upon the occasion of their births. This they do, downing the booze and shucking off their clothes with admirable efficiency. This scene goes on for some time, and is in fact one of the grooviest things I've witnessed in quite a while: psychedelic music, frenetic hippy dancing, Laugh-In-style zooms, and warped, distorted reflections in which the director and crew don't even bother to hide themselves--it's a gas gas gas, truly.

Eventually the trio drop to the floor, their bodies shutting down due to sheer grooviness overload. Meanwhile the UNESCO agent is tracking down the source of those suspicious bottles, and no points for guessing where the trail leads. Sub-meanwhile, Dr. Genovese and Nina are arguing over the relative values of science and business, which ends with Nina filling the doctor's Super Robot full of lead...well, more lead. Max and AfroGirl FINALLY get suspicious and decide to investigate the basement, where they find a freezer full of dead, naked, bloodless bodies in a genuinely chilling scene. (What I did there--you see it?) The purpose of Antonio's robot is finally revealed, as is the reason behind the whole operation; the Hooker succumbs to the dictates of the Robot's silly but deadly prime directive, and the Hippies are next on the slab. Will UNESCO reach them in time, or will they be riding out in the next delivery truck, in 750 milliliter-increments?

Love Machine

It's hard to imagine The Red-Stained Lawn being made at any time other than the 1970s--in fact, it's hard to imagine it being made even then. But made it was, and I for one couldn't be happier about it. I loved the relentlessly groovy fashions, the broad-strokes characterizations, the repetitive and intrusive score, and even the overly earnest folk-rock title song (written and performed by the Drunken Tramp himself, Lucio Dalla, who was apparently a pretty big deal recording artist at the time--I will pay you for a translation! :) ). But most of all I love the unabashed weirdness of the flick, the sci-fi mixed with crime-thriller mixed with hippie drug culture and stirred up with mad science to create a hallucinatory souffle that Mad Movie fans will love getting between their molars.

The acting is all pretty good for a picture of this sort--Dalla steals the show as the comical Tramp, and both Malfatti and Tarascio as the dueling Genoveses are a delight--the missus with her Ice Queen gorgeousness and ruthless amorality, and the doctor with his kooky visionary ramblings and stunning neckties. (Both actors worked together a couple of years earlier in The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave, a movie I really want to revisit now.) The rest of the cast is serviceable, and despite a few rather endearing flubs (equipment shadows in the shot, blinking "corpses," the director's pant-leg cameo in the Mirror Room sequence), the film is rather expertly and beautifully shot--the colors and compositions are often quite stunning, a testament to Ghione's eye.

♫ And I think to myself...what a wonderful world! ♪

In short, for fans of the weird, this is a little-known treasure. 2.75 thumbs.

A few more images from The Red-Stained Lawn (1973):

Anal Sex: Not For Everyone

"Now...where did I put that last bottle of wine?"

Blowout Patch

Rarrr!

Sure it is.

"Please, just try to relax."

Truth.

MORE MADNESS...

Summary only...

Naked and Violent (1970): or, Mondo Americano

I'll admit to having limited first-hand experience with the "Mondo" documentary subgenre. It's a type of film I've read a good deal about but of which I've actually watched relatively few examples, like pre-WWI German Industrialist Hygiene films or Scando-Mongolian Expressionist Midget Porn. Named after the infamous film that inspired all subsequent examples, Paolo Cavara and Gualtiero Jacopetti's Mondo Cane (1962), the Mondo movie specialized in sensationalized depictions of strange, shocking rituals from around the world, often focusing on "savage" cultures like African and South American native tribes.

Actual animal killings, bizarre rites of passage, and taboo sexual ceremonies were the genre's stock in trade, and the lurid scenes that fill such movies were sometimes real, but just as often staged by the filmmakers for maximum shock value. (This aspect of the Mondo film was satirized gruesomely and unforgettably by Ruggero Deodato in his even-more-infamous Cannibal Apocalypse.)

As time went on the "savage" Mondo films (Africa Addio [1966]) were joined by "sexy" Mondo films like L'amore primitivo (1964--according to imdb, "including such things as sex slavery, dwarf love, Asian brothels and lesbians!"), the wonderfully titled Mondo Freudo (1966), and even Russ Meyer's Mondo Topless (1966, reviewed right here on MMMMMovies). As long as something was shocking and exotic and suitably unconfirmable, it was fair game, and the perverted public ate it up.

For trash-film fans from the USA, however, probably none of the Mondo titles is more shocking than Sergio Martino's 1970 effort Naked and Violent (aka America cosi nuda, cosi violenta, or America: So Naked, So Violent). Directing only his third feature and with still a ways to go before finding his stride in a series of excellent, stylish gialli and horror flicks, Martino presents a view of late 60s America as a savage, brutal place, with all the sensationalism and cultural condescension one would expect from the Mondo Africa films it mimics.

"Say you love the U.S. of A. SAY IT, BOY!!!"

We open--after the AMAZING heart-felt title song, "Look Away (Lady Liberty)"--at Cape Kennedy, where for the second time NASA is about to send a group of astronauts to the moon. As the stern, disapproving narrator tells us, the moon no longer charms people the way it used to--jaded by success and affluence, curious Americans gather more to buy spaceman-shaped earrings, interstellar snacks, toy rockets, and even space-themed pornography! Rather than a symbol of the triumph of man over nature, Cape Kennedy has become a "lunar park," an amusement park for the bored, pampered, perverse citizenry to glut its insatiable appetite for thrills.

"I'm about to blast off, baby!"

Insomuch as the flick has a central thesis, this is it: America, the richest country in the world, is full to the brim with sickos. Perhaps because of its wealth and unchecked political power, even the most way-out tastes and fetishes can be indulged, and frequently are. The movie purports to be a documentary of the darkest corners of the American Nightmare.

Viewed dispassionately, it's not a bad thesis--in fact, it's neither the first nor the last film to place the American consumerist lifestyle at the center of all the manifold evils not just in our country, but in the world. A compelling and even damning movie could be made--in 1970 or in the present day--with just that argument as its basis. But of course a Mondo documentary is not the place for serious socio-cultural critiques, and Martino and crew are not interested in presenting one. They're here to shock, and shock they will, by hook or by crook!

Ain't That America?

We start in New York City, which the narrator calls "the largest Italian city in the world," as it contains at least four million people with Italian surnames. Looking at the massive skyscrapers in a dizzying vertical shot from street level, he informs us that some of these buildings, with hundreds and hundreds of floors, are built "entirely without windows!" Then we take a tour of the Bowery, where we see alcoholic bums sleeping on the street as passersby step over them. Finally we visit a Retirement Home, where sad-faced, dementia-plagued seniors languish, "forgotten" by society. One old man is happy to be used for experimental cancer treatments, we're told, as it promises him a chance to be "useful."

In a time-honored Mondo technique of juxtaposing the grotesque with the sensual, we are then flown to Miami beach, where we watch some of the "most healthy, well-fed examples of youth" in the world. It's a cheap shot to go from the dying derelict cancer patient to the beautiful bodies of Miami, but it's also an effective one--you can't help but be drawn in, and then ashamed for it, which is of course the point. Sniffing most derisively, the narrator tells us these girls "all have the most perfect figures possible...and therefore, identical ones."

Well, there's no arguing with that methodology.

A few shots underwater and on the beach hint at some of Martino's future style, but just barely. Still, as quick and dirty as mondo films were, it's surprising any got through at all. The film moves at an absolutely breakneck pace, hardly giving one scene or pronouncement time to register before moving on to the Next Shocking Thing. Therefore, narrative summation is neither possible nor terribly useful. It appeals more to my low-level OCD, therefore, to categorize the scenes first by a) subject matter and then by b) reality versus staged.

HIPPIES

• The filmmakers take us to the Woodstock Music Festival, where we see masses of nude, pot-smoking, and sometimes bleeding hippies. The narrator gives us statistics on the number of people who died at the festival (five) and the number of infants born (three) and concludes that Death has bested Life, 5-3. Clearly he wasn't correcting for the Sha Na Na bonus! All this seems to be real footage.

• We also get to see a real-live hippie tripping on smack. (Note, though the filmmakers insist it's LSD, the intravenous administration tends to imply heroin. Of course I'm no hippie myself, so feel free to correct me, junkies!) He blathers about kittens, Mao Tse Tung, salads and salt, and a lot of other stuff. Less fun than it sounds, but believably real.

• Hippie Girls rent themselves out to dirty old men to be human canvasses in an "art" class. The modest $5 fee sounds like a bargain to me. If it's not real, I want to believe it was anyway.

...but I know what I like.

• In the fairly obviously staged hippie segments, we start with the bored bourgeois housewives of San Franscisco going down the strip and picking up dirty hippies for "follow ups"--i.e., dirty weekends with no strings attached. Later on we see a trio hiring a hippie hustler for a love-in, to which they've graciously invited the cameras. Ever wanted to see a hippie forcibly bathed? Now's your chance.

• Things get wilder with a suburban/hippie mash-up, as a group of stoned orgy enthusiasts don rubber horror masks and then practice free and indiscriminate love all over each other. I don't know why I never thought to bring a fog machine to my orgies, but these flower children have shown me the error of my ways.

• Less fun is the peep-show between the gates of the Polanski mansion, where Sharon Tate et al. met their grisly and famous demises. This is immediately followed by a Black Mass Ceremony in which a hippie girl is stripped naked (Zang!), her body covered with hot dripping wax (kink wahey!) and then a live chicken has its head pulled off and the blood graphically squeezed all over her skin (Yeah bab-hey, wait, shit, that's fuckin' gross...). The animal death is real, and so was my vomit.
  

Don't think about the chicken

RACE RELATIONS

Of course the great shames of America's history are the country's treatment of the Native Americans and the slave trade, and the fallout from both serves for prime fodder for exploitation.

• With the Native Americans, we see a poverty-stricken village in the Grand Canyon, which is fairly respectfully done. They try to milk a later scene with a group of Native American's staging a protest at Alcatraz, but there's really not much there.

• With Black/White relations in the US, the filmmakers have considerably more luck. In the real footage, we get to see a "South Will Rise Again" old woman toting her shotgun around her city streets, presumably looking for negroes. We also hear from the female owner of a newspaper in a town that has just elected its first black mayor, and she has some unflattering things to say about it, both in print and on film.

• In a rather amazing betrayal of the width of the cultural disconnect and the Italians' own racial attitudes, Martino films a Black church revival meeting, explicitly connecting the religious celebrations with the former slaves' African pasts. That's as may be, but he follows it with "actual footage shot in New York City!" of a full-on voodoo ceremony, where a chicken is killed and women go through a rite of passage that involves a machete in the crotch. Later we see a middle-class voodoo rite where the witch doctor "parks his Cadillac before putting on his grass skirt," leading to more African costumes and dancing. It's as if the filmmakers think they can't have a Mondo movie without tribal ceremonies, and have bent over backwards to make sure they can fit them in. (Not voodoo, but still exploitative: there's also a staged lynching re-enactment that's as uncomfortable as it should be.)
  

New York, Yesterday

BIZARRO

And then there are the things that just have no category.

• Cowboys string up a dozen live rabbits by their feet to a clothesline, then take target practice with rifles, the effects of which on the helpless bunnies' heads are graphically shown. Not for the weak of stomach, this scene was probably the most cruel and unnecessary I've seen since the monkey-eaten-by-python sequence in Slave of the Cannibal God--also, coincidentally, directed by Martino.

• A lonely nebbish brings a surprise package home with him, which turns out to be an inflatable sex doll! We get a lot of mileage out of the poor fellow blowing up his date and then dressing her in nylons. Fortunately we cut away before he actually gets his groove on. It does make one appreciate the advance in technology, however.

Even your fantasy girl disapproves

• In Las Vegas, men at a circus-themed casino throw balls at a dunking-booth style target while blanket-covered women on mechanical beds watch. When one hits the target, the girl is dumped to the stage where she performs a strip-tease! Which casino is that again?

• A pacifist, hoping to stay out of the draft, recruits his long-haired friends to chop off his fingers so he can't hold a gun! This is shown in graphic detail, which points out the absolute fakeness of it, and thus becomes hilarious.

The Shocking Truth

• And then there are the parts of American culture that must seem strange to anyone not borne to it: American football (49ers and Bears, or Gladiatorial Combat?); drag racing and short-track motorcycle racing (the latter of which looks legitimately, CRAZILY dangerous); a drive through Dallas along the very route where JFK was assassinated, and the statement that because of the tourist industry rising around the site of the murder, it has become "an amusement park of death"; Hugh Hefner's contradictory Playboy philosophy (juxtaposed with the killing of the rabbits above, of course); the Amish (which the Italians don't get AT ALL); and even a short segment devoted to the phenomenon of monster toys!

Multo Mondo

After these and dozens of other scenes by turns shocking, hilarious, and downright baffling (and sometimes all of these at once), Martino winds up with a short vignette about old folks retiring to the "paradise" of Florida--lots of the happy aged cavorting about in ill-advised bikinis, etc.--which is a 50-years-on revisit of the Miami Beach cheesecake from earlier (cottage cheesecake, maybe?) , but also directly contradicts his early uncomfortable visit to the nursing homes where we supposedly lock away the aged who can no longer live a happy life. Ah well, whattaya expecting here, Ken Burns?

And possibly a comb

The final manipulative twist of the knife is a scene purporting to show something good and noble about the American spirit, to offset all the preceding ugliness. What demonstrates the basic humanity of Americans better than anything else? Well, according to Martino, it's a 2000-soul strong home for "retarded" children, where kind-hearted USA-sians teach the mentally deficient to feed themselves, dress, and perform Christmas pageants. It's a choice clearly made as an excuse to show the afflicted children as sideshow grotesques, and is fairly shameless and exploitative in the worst sense--what I mean is, it's one thing to make fun of middle-class hippies in psychodrama therapy, but another to leer at mentally handicapped children smearing oatmeal in their hair and shrieking "Silent Night" off key. I've got a pretty high threshhold, I'd like to think, but this seemed extremely icky in its intent and execution.

The conclusion of the documentary will get any red-blooded American's dander up, as the narrator unleashes a poetically damning speeach at one of the country's most beloved symbols, the Statue of Liberty. After reciting the "Give us your poor, your tired, etc." speech, the narrator responds:

"Oh, put out your light you hoarse old gal. Your shouts do not move me anymore. Your call sounds always fine, I must admit. But I cannot accept it any longer. After years listening to your lies, I don't care anymore. Put out your light! Ye tired old gal. And turn your back to the Ocean. And put a little love, if you can, in me too."

It's a good thing for Martino & co. Toby Keith wasn't around in 1970--and also that one presumes he doesn't watch that many movies with subtitles. (Or maybe he does, what do I know?) He'd have put more than love into him, that's fer sher. Boot-shaped love, courtesy the Red White and Blue! YEEE-HAW!

Of Thee I Sing

I can only assume the print MYA DVD used for their transfer was the best surviving one they could find, but it's still in pretty rough shape--lots of scratches, specks, and occasional print-damage jump-cuts. But as you might imagine, that sort of enhances the viewing of a Mondo film rather than taking away from it.

As a film by a man whose later work I admire a great deal (well, except for the cannibal stuff), I find it interesting to see how Sergio Martino got his start, even if little of his later trademark style is in evidence. As a time capsule of perversion, an exercise in gross-outs, and a fascinating look at my own country's culture from an outside point of view, I'd recommend Naked and Violent to those interested in that sort of thing. 2 thumbs.

Just keep it away from Lee Greenwood, though--God knows it would probably kill him!

"*Sigh.* Well, shit."

MORE MADNESS...

Summary only...

La Papesse (1974): or, Dreams in the Whip-House

I had never heard of director/novelist/playwright Mario Mercier before I came across a copy of his 1974 movie La Papesse (aka A Woman Possessed), but what I saw in my initial viewing of this extraordinary film was enough to make me curious enough to go digging. A writer whose work was censored mightily in France upon its publication, Mercier was a spiritualist and eroticist whose tales of witchcraft, necrophilia, and sexual cruelty earned it comparisons to the work of the Marquis de Sade, specifically his infamous magnum opus 120 Days of Sodom (the inspiration for the just-as-infamous film adaptation Salò by Pier Paolo Pasolini). According to this excellent article on Esotika Film's website, the Censure Française thought just as little of Mercier's work in filmmaking, banning La Papesse from the start and calling it “nothing but an uninterrupted succession of scenes of sadism, torture and violence, and a total and permanent disregard for humanity, displayed in a crude and revolting fashion.”

Looking back from our perch on the apex of filmic cruelty here in 2010 such a pronouncement might seem a little quaint--the violence and torture on display is nothing compared to what goes on today, or even in American films of the same era (*cough*Texas Chain Saw Massacre*cough*). What the censorial board missed--and what Mad Movie Fans will appreciate, I hope--is that Mercier's film is a sexy, surrealism-tinged journey into a dark fairy tale that kept me fascinated and thinking about it long after the end credits.

Also: lots of boobs.

Laurent (Jean-François Delacour) is a frustrated artist, and like many artists in the 70s is not averse to wandering off the beaten path in search of inspiration. As it turns out these searchings--as they so often do in cases like this--lead directly to the hairy feet of SATAN. "Somewhere in the world," the narrator tells us, Laurent discovers "a cult whose ancient origins spawned in night." In the opening scene he is being initiated to this cult by Iltra (the gorgeous and enigmatic Geziale) and her henchmen Borg and Steve. The ceremony involves being buried up to his neck in a fire-ringed pit and having a bucket of snakes dumped on his head! Laurent screams like a little girl, which apparently does little to cement his cult-member status.

Snake Bite

Back home, Larent gets into a dinnertime squabble with his fed-up red-haired wife Aline (Lisa Livane, I think), who's had it up to here with his pretentions to a "life of magic and spectacle!" Laurent thinks marriage should be "a rubber band, not a chain," a view Aline surprisingly doesn't share. Perhaps still smarting from his serpentine sissiness, Laurent decidees to man up and lay down the law: "Either enter my world, or I'll eliminate you!" Realizing too late that statements of this nature are likely to result in neither sex nor sammiches, Laurent storms off for his next cultish ordeal.

It's here we get our first taste of Mercier's transgressive sexual ideas: in an eerie, dreamlike wastescape, Laurent is strapped to a cross and brutally whipped by Borg till he passes out from the pain. At the same time Aline is plagued by BDSM nightmares, seeing herself similarly crucified (nude, naturally) and flogged by a group of gray-robed Inquisitors. Through the aura of a vaseline-smeared lens, Aline is taunted by her torturers--"Look, doggie, at the exit that awaits you!"--and then inexplicably aged 50 years before she wakes up in a sexy sweat, thankful it was all a horrible (?) dream. The whip-stripes on her back, however, tell a different story.

"Hi there--we're here to take your baby away."

Having become aware of Aline through Laurent's psychic link to her (or else through his piteous wailings for his wifey to come save him from the mean skinhead's lash), Iltra calls in the leader of the cult, an unnamed Witch Queen equal parts Rollin vamp and Meyer babe. "You have a nervous woman--she will make an excellent subject!" the queen tells Laurent, and just like that we've shifted our focus from the crybaby painter to his reserved but much more interesting life partner.

Back home, Aline wanders into the woods and is beseiged by visions of malicious nature spirits and then chased by a couple of mysterious thieves, in a scene that reminded me strongly of the dreamlike imagery in Lemora: a Child's Tale of the Supernatural and Valerie and Her Week of Wonders. She stumbles back to the house where Laurent and Iltra are waiting for her. "I can't stay alone here, in this shack of misfortune!" she cries, and it just so happens Iltra knows a place where she can stay instead...

Gnarly.

Aline is installed in the cult's communal living space/haunted curio shop, where heads hang from hooks and random cultists tear strips of raw meat off suspiciously-shaped hams. Iltra and the Witch Queen offer Laurent a bargain--let them have his woman, and he can be one of the gang. The painter is all to happy to take that deal, and so begin Aline's trials. First she's turned out into the woods again, nearly nude, while Borg attacks her clad in gladiatorial armor! She gets the best of the skinhead, whipping him into submission with a cat o'nine tails in a scene to titillate tops and bottoms alike. Steve gets similar treatment, cementing the movie's status as a BDSM-stravaganza.

I've mentioned the dreamlike atmosphere of the piece a couple of times, but it really bears emphasizing again. Mercier expertly creates a world that starts out weird but recognizable, then slowly, inexorably spirals into the the darkest realm of fantasy and fairy tale. The weird craggy landscapes, shadowy forests, and stylized acting all combine to nudge us further and further into the dream/nightmare world in which Aline is trapped, so that by the time the REALLY weird shit starts to happen, we're more or less ready to go along for the ride.

Aline feels a little cross

Things go even further into BDSM Fantasy Land in the days that follow, as Aline is kept in the stable like a hog and forced to eat slop from a trough--which one of the male cultists had already pissed in for flavor. To add humiliation to...well...all that previous humiliation, Aline is then tied down, spanked viciously, and branded on the ass with a hot iron! Laurent, showing his first iota of human compassion for another person EVER, starts to feel bad about Aline's treatment, but is reassured by his Culty Mistresses: "Don't worry--she's being reformed!" Holy Story of O, Batman!

I don't know if Mercier was influenced by Vicar-fave director Jean Rollin's visual style, or their both being sex-and-fantastique-centric French directors in the 70s just meant they shared a lot of the same zeitgeist, but the cult ceremony scenes that follow reminded me very much of similar scenes in Rollin movies, specifically The Nude Vampire and Requiem for a Vampire. The cultists come down the rocky terrain bearing torches, all dressed in primary-colored robes (not as diaphanous as those Rollin favors, but still), and then cast Aline into an open grave. "In spite of you, you are our wife now!" the Witch Queen tells her, then sics the Charles Manson-esque Steve on her to consummate their "marriage." While the grave rape goes on, the cultists sacrifice a rooster (WARNING: ACTUAL CHICKEN SNUFF), and squeeze its blood into a golden chalice. Then, on cue, Steve interruptuses his coitus in order to add another kind of cock juice to the brew!

Okay, so maybe the Censure Française had a point after all.

The cult recommends Cuivre Reserve Château Bottled Nuit San Wogga Wogga.

The Witch Queen's plan becomes clear when she preaches to the group: "I have a mission to prepare the women of all races"--to be sexy, sexy overlords, apparently. (And I, for one, welcome them!) Invited to give the Witch Queen "the kiss of submission," Aline instead bites her and runs off, chased by Borg and his dog. Making lemonade out of bloody lips, the Queen orders the Wild Rumpus to start--where "rumpus" here means "Nude Epileptic Seizures and Group Sex!"--and takes Laurent to her altar to impregnate her with the devil's child, or something.

Meanwhile Aline runs through another dreamscape to a dark cave, where Borg walls her in. Lost in the dark, she's visited by a green-winged, Nosferatu-fingered spirit "that eats sexual things"--luckily (?) for her, "eat" here is a euphemism.

"Please, just try to relax."

After this ordeal we come to an even wilder finishing quarter hour in which Laurent, feeling protective of his former love or else pissy about being left out of all the lesbonic fun, turns on the cult and tries to save Aline at last. But is the Witch Queen too powerful? Will virtue triumph over vice? If you were paying attention to Mercier's literary influences above, you might have an inkling as to the answer.

Also, you get to see the Witch Queen in a gold belt and silver finger extensions--and nothing else--being whipped by her cult as part of a final ceremony to bring about whatever prophecy they've been waiting for the whole time. Or else just because she's into it, which seems a lot more likely.

Learn to Love It

This is a wild, WILD movie that came out of nowhere and knocked me over. Satanism, witchcraft, BDSM, fairy tale demons and wood sprites, hippie orgies and improbably ornate ceremonial gear (including Iltra's amazing breast-baring gown, complete with black-ringed fuchsia pasties)--this movie just really has it all. Add to that some gorgeous cinematography and even more gorgeous women, and bestowing the 3+ thumb rating on this one is a no-brainer.

If you get a chance to see this one, definitely take it. The version I had sported some occasionally clumsy subtitles (lots of male/female pronoun confusion, and occasional untranslated exchanges) but I could pick most of it up from context, and the visuals were the important thing anyway. Now I'm definitely interested in finding a translation of some of Mercier's novels, if they exist, and seeking out his other two films. If any parishioners have info on Mercier and his work, please let me know!

Some more great images from La Papesse (1974):

With that belt buckle, I'll just bet he will!

Geziale: Smokin' Hawt

Witchcult Today

"When I give Borg the signal, you may feel a little pressure..."

You'd do it too

A little head for everyone!

I don't think she's talking about the World Cup, somehow...


"..but then I know you to be a Demonic Priestess bent on sexual domination, so clearly I cannot choose the wine in front of me!"

I'm sold.

The Big Borg Wolf

"Kermit was right, this sucks!"

MORE MADNESS...

Summary only...