The Eerie Midnight Horror Show (1974)

aka Enter the Devil

aka The Devil Obsession

aka The Sexorcist

aka The Tormented

Original title: L'ossessa

When art student and ingénue Danila (Stella Carnacina, who will turn out to by a very enthusiastic actress when her time to writhe, shout, moan and puke green stuff comes) takes on the job of helping restore a wooden religious statue whose mere sight seems to arouse her, she probably doesn't expect what follows. After watching her mother (Lucretia Love) take a friendly rose whipping by her lover, Danila has a vision of the statue coming to life as Ivan Rassimov and having sex with her (most reviews actually speak of rape, but the act is clearly consensual in the print I saw). Suddenly, Danila's mild-mannered character begins to change.

A new-found interest in very rough masturbation and spending her nights screaming soon turns into an attempt to seduce her father (Chris Avram), who declines, leading to more noisome behaviour. Why, you could think Danila is possessed!

A bit of rest seems to help the young woman just fine, though, until she visits a former heathen temple. At this point, it's vision time again. Now, Danila sees herself at a Witches' Sabbath, where she pledges herself to Satan (who likes to spend time hanging on a cross, laughing, it seems) and gets crucified for her trouble. Danila's following hysterics are enough for the group of doctors her parents called in to diagnose her as Possessed by the Devil (it's SCIENCE!, I tell you) and give her into the loving (perhaps too loving) hands of exorcist Father Xeno (Luigi Pistilli), a man who, frankly, sucks at his job so much I was rooting for Satan.

Yes, Enter the Devil (or whichever title you prefer) was another of many attempts of the Italian cheap-shot film industry to beat The Exorcist (winner of the title "classic horror movie I personally care least about") at its own game by sexing it up a little (or a lot) and going into directions US movies even in the 70s seldom dared to walk.

For the first thirty or forty minutes, director Mario Gariazzo (last seen here making the noirish and very interesting Passport for a Corpse) delivers a film with a fine eye for taboo-skirting sleaze, put side by side with imagery that would probably look pretty blasphemous to me if I were Catholic; you just gotta love the willingness of Italian filmmakers to go to places like this.

Unfortunately, the conceptually wonderful and creative scene of the wooden statue coming to life and then having a bit of fun isn't really a sign pointing in the direction the film will be moving in during its second half. It doesn't take too long until The Sexorcist mostly gives up on the sexually loaded imagery (except for a slight return with a lame but nearly effective attempt by possessed Danila to seduce the hapless Father Xeno), wags its finger at Danila's mum's sex practices (really), and goes for the most basic exorcism movie stuff, with a lot of unexciting writhing and praying. In a film that starts out as sleazily strong as this one did, that really is a bit of a shame.

The Devil Obsession isn't improved by Gariazzo's rather variable direction style. Here, too, the film starts out strong with scenes filmed with a certain panache, a clear eye for the strange, and a complete absence of subtlety, but soon enough gets dragged down to a level where nothing that's happening on screen is staged in an interesting manner. I wouldn't be at all surprised if somebody told me there were two directors at work here, one responsible for the three vision sequences and the early scenes in the church, and somebody much less talented for the rest of the film. This is, of course, mere speculation.

Be that as it may, I can't say I found The Eerie Midnight Horror Show (a most puzzling title for the film at hand) to be all that bad as possession movies go. While its second half is pretty boring, it does at least have three (perhaps even four) good scenes, which is more than I'd be willing to say about a lot of movies.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,reviews,horror,mario gariazzo,stella carnacina,lucretia love,ivan rassimov,luigi pistilli

Passport For A Corpse (1962)

Four war veterans raid a money transport. Although one of the men, Walter (Erno Crisa), has spent months planning the assault, something goes very wrong, and all of the men except for one are killed by the police. The survivor, whose name is Maurice (or Marco in the mutilated English dub of the film; he is in any case played by Alberto Lupo), is able to grab some of the money he and his friends were after and manages to flee. Maurice is positive that the police know who he is and are now after him, but he has to make one final visit with his girlfriend, the weird-early-60s-film-stripper Helene (Helene Chanel).

Helene didn't know about her boyfriend's mad plan beforehand, and at first tries her best to convince him to give himself up to the police, but when Maurice makes it clear to her that he'd have no hope ever getting out of jail again, she decides to go with his plan of escape. Helene herself just needs to cross the border to France and wait there for Maurice, but the man can't risk crossing the border in the normal, legal way. Maurice knows an old smuggler's route through the mountains, but he isn't exactly lucky.

That's not much of a surprise, especially since Maurice has already repeatedly met a mysterious woman (Linda Christian?). Her name might be Destiny or it might be Death, and there's just no escaping her gaze.

When Maurice's first plan for crossing the border doesn't work out, he spontaneously hides inside a coffin that is bound for France, but his ride has to turn round and he soon finds himself locked inside a cooler inside a morgue - the same morgue, it turns out, where the bodies of the robber's dead friends are waiting for their burial. This is not going to be Destiny's last joke on Maurice.

Mario Gariazzo's Passport for a Corpse is clearly influenced by the most bleak and pessimist arm of noir cinema, at least when it comes to its thematic interests and its outlook on life and death. It's a film about the world as an existential hell-hole, and without the personification of Destiny Gariazzo uses, the film would certainly deserve to be called intensely nihilist - but where there are metaphors walking around, there's no true nihilism to be found. Of course, living in a consciously cruel universe isn't much of an improvement over living in an utterly meaningless universe ruled by entropy, and doesn't make the film any less bleak.

While Passport for a Corpse is ideologically (and emotionally) close to the wellspring of noir, it is only from time to time visually comparable to its mother genre. Gariazzo doesn't use his black and white camera for much fancy (and thematically fitting) shadow play or any of the other visual extravagances that noir cinema used to step away from naturalism and to show its characters' inner turmoil on screen. Gariazzo's visual style is relatively static. The camera never puts itself actively into the viewer's consciousness, but it is this minimal and underplayed aspect of the film that is especially important in demonstrating that Maurice/Marco is caught in a trap even before he and his friends are setting their plan into motion. The camera always stays close to Marco, caging him in the minimalist (or cheap) interior sets from the very beginning. His ordeal in the coffin and the morgue are only an escalation of a situation that must have started before the viewers have laid eyes on him. Even the (decidedly non-staged) natural locations give no respite from claustrophobia. Nature is a cage build of mountains and a whiteness of snow that crushes visibility and hope.

It doesn't come as a surprise in a film like this that the acting and dialogue/internal monologue tend a bit to the melodramatic side. One could argue that the acting is decidedly fake, but I don't think "realism" is one of Gariazzo's goals here. Lupo and Chanel's rather exalted performances are not meant to portray psychologically deep characters, but to intensify the thematic pressure on the film's audience. This is not a film about people, but a film about concepts like desperation and futility, and Gariazzo is making damn sure that even the slower members of the audience will realize it. And if the acting and the dialogue still aren't enough to achieve that goal, you can always hit your audience over the head with a walking, mockingly laughing metaphor.

This sledgehammer quality of the film is at once its biggest strength (this certainly is a film that knows what it wants) and its biggest weakness. I found Passport for a Corpse's complete lack of subtlety quite distancing on an emotional level - which I don't think is what Gariazzo was going for -, but was still able to appreciate the film on the level of craft.

There's something to be said for the film's power of hysterical negativity.

 

Technorati-Tags: italian movies,mario gariazzo,crime,noir,reviews,alberto lupo,helene chanel