Les sorcières du bord du lac

This offbeat art/sexploitation flick is at once typical of an adventurous era in European cinema, and a sort of "fine--but what are you gonna do with it?" curio. Handsome Ray Lovelock (who sings a couple uninspired folk-troubador songs on the soundtrack) is a longhaired motorcyclist lured into the forest idyll of three classic Eurobabes circa 1970 (big hair/wigs, near-Kabuki levels of makeup, outré couture wear when they're wearing any clothes at all) living in a pop-art palazzo in the middle of nowhere for no reason at all. Of course, something supernatural is going on, and it's hardly a spoiler to say that once these three glam spiders have had their way with this male butterfly, he won't be riding off into the sunset but meeting a considerably grimmer fate.

Not as much fun as the Swinging London blowout "The Touchables" two years earlier, which had a similar Adam-held-captive-by-three-sexy-Eves premise, this takes its allegorical aspects just seriously enough to be rather ponderous, partly because it's a little too highly polished in presentation without quite being eccentrically individual enough in style. The aesthetic is a little like high-fashion advertising--skilled, artistic, but a little arid. When the violence finally arrives it is bracingly unbridled, but more attention to the creeping dread of the horror undertow and less mild, picturesque erotica would have made the movie seem less mannered and empty as it idles its way towards the inevitable. Still, if you're a fan of such vintage counterculture/Eurotrash kitsch, it's certainly worth seeing once.

A colourful tale in beautiful lakeside, woodland setting where three wondrous ladies reside, in all their mystery. The film opens with Raymond Lovelock as a motorcycling hippie encountering a Rolls Royce owner, who comes across aforementioned ladies. Ida Galli has appeared in dozens of films including many gialli, her very first film being La Dolce Vita. Silvia Monti was in several notable films including the following year's, Lizard in a Woman's Skin and Haydee Politoff was in two notable cult films the previous year, Interrabang and Check to the Queen. I wish I could be more positive about this most likable film but although the ladies are lovely, Lovelock does a fine job and the director also, plus fantastic costumes, so little actually happens.

Hailing from the hippie era, Queens of Evil is a warning to blokes wishing to lead a carefree life without the burden of rules, regulations and boundaries: beware of the bourgeoisie, whose supremacy is threatened by the hippie lifestyle, and of women who might seek to trap such men in a relationship and force them to betray their ideals.

Ray Lovelock (The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue) stars as handsome drop-out David, who stops his motorbike to help a rich man (Gianni Santuccio) fix a flat tyre on his car. The driver returns David's kindness by mocking the young man's lifestyle and surreptitiously pushing a nail into the front tyre of his bike. After fixing his puncture, David gives chase, demanding to know why the man was so mean; the wealthy man loses control of his vehicle and crashes into a tree. David sees that the driver is dead, so continues his journey. When he sees a police car on the road ahead, he takes another route that leads him deep into the woods, where he happens upon a cottage by a lake. David settles down for the night in a wood shed, and is woken the following morning by a beautiful young woman (Haydée Politoff), who introduces herself as Liv.

Liv invites David to stay for breakfast, and introduces him to her sexy sisters, Bibiana (Evelyn Stewart) and Samantha (Silvia Monti). He accepts Liv's invitation, and is surprised by the stylish decor of the cottage (there are massive portraits of the three women on the walls and countless scatter cushions). He is given cake to eat for breakfast ('let them eat cake'), after which he announces it is time for him to leave. The draw of three beauties is too much for him, however, and he returns, accompanying the women on a fishing trip. Bibiana shows David her hobby - embalming squirrels - and Samantha takes his bike for a joy-ride. Liv appears to be able to matter transport herself. Despite the sisters' obvious eccentricities, David stays, and beds both Samantha and Bibiana.

Waking in the night, David sees the three women talking to a man. He sneaks out of the house to follow the mysterious visitor, but is knocked unconscious by a lightning strike during a sudden storm, after which he has a very strange dream in which the sisters wear crazy wigs and body paint. Regaining consciousness in bed, having been found in the woods by the women, David enquires about the stranger: they tell him that the man is the owner of a nearby castle, and that they have all been invited to a party there that night. At the gathering, David feels intimidated by the rich weirdo guests and their incessant questions, and flees into the welcoming arms (and between the welcoming legs) of Liv. After shagging the youngest of the sisters, and renouncing his hippie principles, all three women turn on David, hacking him to death with a variety of sharp implements.

The final scene reveals the owner of the castle - the very same man who David met on the road at the beginning of the film - to be none other than the devil, who uses the three sisters to help him do away with hippie folk like David who have no moral code, for how can the devil exist if the concept of sin no longer exists?

Although not quite as wonderfully weird as The Spider Labyrinth, which was produced by this film's director Tonino Cervi, Queens of Evil features its fair share of fun strangeness, the film a dark, surreal art-house fairytale that must surely have involved mind-altering substances during its making. It's a frequently perplexing tale, the directorial style and bizarre story not always easy to decipher, but those who dig obscure cult Euro-horror should find enough to enjoy here.

I rate the film 6.5 random shots of a seagull out of 10, rounded up to 7 for that amazing kitchen.

Dippy hippy David is travelling freely through somewhere or other on his motorbike, feeling the wind in his hair and superiority on his ego. He lives free, is not faithful to any woman because 'that would make him unfaithful to all the other women', you know, all that crap. I suppose I'll give him credit for stopping to help a sinister old man who's got a flat tyre, but let's face it: the guy's a sponger. That's what this film is – a parable on what happens when you're a want your money for nothing and your chicks for free.

After David somehow manages to kill this old guy in a car crash, he hides out in a shed for a while, until he discovers that the house next to the shed is inhabited by three ladies. There's Samantha (dirty-looking, too skinny) Bibiana (grumpy, too skinny) and Liv (Naïve, another dippy hippy) who invite him in for breakfast – gigantic cakes! Wait – those cakes stand for symbolism! That means that the other bit where they give him an apple to eat...

It might be a good time to describe the interior of this house too – the living room is filled with hundreds of cushions, some fake trees, and three gigantic pictures of the chicks on the back wall. Their rooms also have a huge picture and a velvet covered bed each and their kitchen is a bizarre angular nightmare made up fifty-thousand shelves and dookits. This is useful information I'm giving you here, as usual.

There's something about the way these girls can teleport about the place and perform satanic ceremonies that Raymond just doesn't like, but he's gets to bang all three of them so what does he care? They all keep going on about some castle where some strange guy lives and how Raymond got to meet this guy who the girls have a secret meeting with, and so on and so forth until the ending that completely shifts the tone of the film.

What makes it so bizarrely watchable is that these three girls seem to have limitless supply of long flowing gowns of many colours, mental make up and crazy wigs, and throughout the film the wigs get bigger and more insane. There's also a really huge arty streak throughout this one, from the twitchy editing to the bizarre sequences where Ida Galli has some sort of weird dragon painted on one boob, to the hellish soundtrack of Ray Lovelock singing some song about how this and that is 'gonna get ya'.

In the wake of a road accident, a young drifter on motorbike is lured to his unforeseen fate at the hands of three stunning sisters, residing in an incommunicado deep-woods cabin(with interior furnishings that look like they were lifted from the sets of A CLOCKWORK ORANGE).

LE REGINE is a more-than-partially successful merging of pop-artsy midcentury modernism with fairly routine erotic eurohorror. A variably intriguing mood piece with a retro-cool music score by Angelo Francesco Lavagnino(a soundtrack LP was released), it's thick with a phantasmagorical atmosphere, both sinister and celestial. The highly attractive primary castmembers vitalize their characters with moxie, especially during the intermittent soft-erotic scenes(which are to the libido as the spur is to the bronco).

Le REGINE maintains a slow but steady pace, and remains interesting and consistently watchable straight through to the alarming and entirely out-of-nowhere final curtain. While it's certainly not a perfect picture, this largely overlooked oddity warrants reassessment, and probably deserves a few long-withheld acknowledgements...it's a notch or two above the standard for sexy 70s Eurotrash, and just that little bit out of the ordinary.

7/10...a nice surprise.