This movie starts with a young woman (Camille Keaton) having a strange nightmare where she's chased through the woods by strange people in psychedelic-colored fright wigs. Back in the "real" world she picks up a hitch-hiking male student and takes him back to her villa for some nude swimming and hot sex, while an older relative or lover(?), played Silvan Tranquino, spies on them. They go for a ride on her speedboat and there's a flashback to (another?) a former lover who was apparently killed in an auto racing accident (cue the usual gratuitous 70's Italian auto racing footage). There's some more hot sex on the boat and a slow-motion, boob-bouncing nude horseback-riding scene before the couple hit a trendy discotheque. Then it's back to the villa for a swinging party where the seemingly dead former lover shows up with another woman (Paola Senatore). The movie only gets exponentially weirder from there, finally culminating in an ending that is kind of like "The Wizard of Oz" on really bad acid.
It's hard to classify this movie. At first, it seems like a Gothic horror, but it lacks a lot of clearly supernatural elements. The excellent visuals and music suggest a giallo, but it really lacks the mystery thriller elements (and the large body count) of that genre. It COULD be considered a sex film--the gorgeous Keaton is often clad scantily or not at all and the incredibly sexy future porn star Senatore does a wild striptease. But the actual sex is pretty tame (especially compared to the same director, Robert Mauri's, unbelievable raunchfest "Le Porno Killers" a few years later), and a potential lesbian scene between Keaton and Senatore is tragically aborted (Oh, the humanity!).
This movie doesn't make a lot of sense frankly and there are long stretches where nothing is happening. The ending doesn't entirely work either. Still it has very good visuals and music and it kept my interest simply because it is so unpredictably bizarre. Far from being a bad actress, Camille Keaton is a mesmerizing presence. She was not only a stunning beauty, but she has an amazing face that is alternately ethereally innocent and seductively sinister (she's best known in America, unfortunately, for the notorious grindhouse "classic" "I Spit on Your Grave", but check her out also in "What Have You Done to Solange?" and "Tragic Ceremony"). Silvano Traquino was a very underrated Italian character actor who appeared excellent gialli like "The Bloodstained Butterfly" and "Smile Before Death". And as for Paola Senatore--well, how can I put this. She could no doubt give a dead man a raging erection.
This is very hard-to-find and currently only available in Italian. But if that doesn't dissuade you too much, definitely check it out.
