Exploito All’Italiana: Black Magic Rites (Renato Polselli, 1973)

 So, having managed to maintain this blog for the better part of fifteen years, it feels remiss of me not have dedicated at least a few paragraphs to discussing the indescribable cinematic singularity which is Renato Polselli’s ‘Riti, Magie Nere e Segrete Orge nel Trecento’ [‘Rites, Black Magic and Secret Orgies of the Fourteenth Century’], aka ‘The Reincarnation of Isobel’, allegedly aka ‘The Ghastly Orgies of Count Dracula’… but known to most of us (for the sake of brevity, if nothing else) simply as ‘Black Magic Rites’.

So, what with it being October, and having just spent some time luxuriating in the glow of Indicator’s never-thought-I’d-see-the-day 4k restoration… now would seem to be the time to take a deep breath and get on with it.

It must be admitted from the outset that this is a very difficult movie to try to review in any conventional sense, as those who have seen it will surely appreciate.

It is not only the film’s almost total lack of narrative which causes difficulties for the potential critic, but the seeming lack of any unifying pattern or purpose whatsoever. Faced with the onslaught of audio-visual anarchy found herein, the idea of understanding what Polselli’s intentions were in creating this thing, or of positing any framework against which his success may be assessed, seems nigh on impossible.

‘Black Magic Rites’ is, essentially, about as close as a piece of ostensibly commercial cinema has ever come to a state of utter, formless chaos, a celluloid equivalent of the mad piping of the servitors of Lovecraft’s blind idiot god crouching vacantly at the centre of the uncaring universe.

If you go in with enough determination, and pay close enough attention, you can identify discrete scenes and sections within the film, albeit generally interrupting and overlapping with each other to no clearly defined purpose. (This time around for instance, I was particularly taken by the whole funeral / premature burial sequence).

But, basically, this is a 100-minute hypnotic drone of a movie - no form, no progression. Most of the characters here are doing exactly the same thing at the end that they were doing at the start. The intermittent fragments of narrative which do creep in from time to time feel a bit like a heavy psychedelic rock band half-heartedly trying to add lyrics and song structure to their music, only for it to be totally drowned out by the roar of their amplifiers.

And what exactly, the uninitiated may ask, might that metaphorical roar consist of?

Well, you know - fire, screaming, gurning faces, crimson gore, kaleidoscopic psychedelic hoo-hah, awkwardly framed tableaux of female and male bodies squeezed into all kinds of outré costumes (both 14th and 20th century vintage), frantic time-and-space shredding jump cuts and cross-edits, lurid red and green disco lighting, erotic torture, breath-taking scenery and groovy castles, anonymous, drooling creeps lurking in shadows, more fire, more screaming faces, hypnotism, witch burnings, widescreen vistas of ritual depravity, pitchfork wielding mobs, chintzy birthday parties, frantic, awkward softcore sex, outbursts of alarming, screechy comic relief, and Count Dracula (apparently). 

The usual, basically - just a whole lot more of it. An all-you-can-eat buffet of all purpose, fumetti-style gothic horror/sleaze.

Within the pantheon of Italian genre directors who have become admired and/or infamous amongst the fans who have painstakingly unearthed their work over the decades, Polselli stands out as the kind of figure who, if he didn’t exist, someone would have had to invent him.

I mean, he had to be out there somewhere on the margins, didn’t he? The guy whose films were more extreme, more hysterical, more chaotic and senseless than anyone else’s, and who was stricken by censorship, public indifference and critical bafflement to such an extent that many of his films were barely even released at all, languishing in unfathomable obscurity for decades, and in some cases remaining almost impossible to see to this day.

And yet, despite these catastrophic set-backs, he kept dusting himself off and coming back to make more of the damned things, driven on by who knows what unfathomable personal demons. Certainly, the few public comments he made during his lifetime shed little light on why he persisted in ploughing his long-suffering financiers’ money into such grotesque, bizarre and (crucially) unprofitable productions. Indeed, reading the sparse interviews conducted with Polselli whilst he was still with us, his attempts to explain himself seem alternately gnomic, cynical and entirely irrelevant to the work at hand.

Suffice to say that, if you were putting together some ‘Berberian Sound Studio’-styled fiction based around the world of Italian cult cinema, you could scarcely hope to create such a fascinating, baffling and hilarious character - and yet, here he is, large as life, with ‘Black Magic Rites’ standing as his defining artistic statement.

Enthusiasts such as myself often tend to praise Euro-horror films for achieving passages of surrealistic delirium. In ‘Black Magic Rites’ though, Polselli begins in a state of surrealistic delirium and keeps his foot down hard on the accelerator right through to the closing ‘FINE’.

As a result, it stands as an example of a piece of pulpy, cynical exploitation assembled with such fevered intensity that it goes full circle on the artistic spectrum, swallowing its own tail and emerging as an experimental art piece; an overwhelming sensory experience that would probably sit better on a double bill next to ‘Flaming Creatures’ or ‘Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome’ than with a Paul Naschy or Sergio Martino movie.

To return to my earlier music metaphor, watching ‘Black Magic Rites’ for the first time as a fan of Euro-horror feels a bit like growing up listening to canonical ‘60s rock, loving the occasional moments of dissonance and feedback... then suddenly discovering Les Rallizes Denudes or Mainliner. Whoa. Too much, man.

Before we get too carried away though, it’s worth splashing our faces with cold water and remembering that, of the individual elements which make up the totality of ‘Black Magic Rites’, none are entirely unique within the Italio-cult context.

The voluminous output of that nation’s cinema during the early ‘70s did, after all, include low budget horror films which, whether by accident or design, were almost entirely incoherent (Angelo Pannacciò’s ‘Sex of the Witch’), or formally and tonally inexplicable (Francesco Mazzei’s The Weapon, The Hour, The Motive). 

There were films which simply pushed WAY TOO FAR to ever see widespread, uncut distribution at the time of their production (Fernando Di Leo’s ‘Slaughter Hotel’ aka ‘Cold Blooded Beast’), and other entries in the “sexy gothic” sub-genre which knowingly plunged over the precipice into full-blown parody and deliberately disjointed, rambling nonsense (Luigi Batzella’s ‘Nude For Satan’) - all trends redolent of a pre-porno film culture which routinely allowed questionably committed filmmakers to essentially go out and shoot whatever the hell they felt like, so long the requisite nudity and softcore groping was delivered on time.

‘Black Magic Rites’ though is the only film I’m aware of which managed to simultaneously cash in on ALL of these crazy possibilities, creating a maximalist overload of ‘70s witch-smut insanity which has never been equalled.

Trying to account for all this on a rational basis, I’m tempted to consider the suggestion floated by Stephen Thrower in his supplement to the Indicator release, that, perhaps, Polselli had intended to make a somewhat more structured, narrative film but (as per the Pannacciò film cited above) simply lost control of the production, discovering after the money had run out and the actors fled the set that he was missing whatever footage he needed to pull the whole thing together.

Hitting the editing room therefore, perhaps with only a few days to spare before delivering a rough cut, he simply panicked, resorting to the only tool available to a director of crazy horror movies in such circumstances - Art! Or, more specifically - jump cuts, and dreams-within-flashbacks-within-dreams, special / temporal disorientation, overlapping images and audio tracks and hypnotic repetition of footage - all cut to the beat of Franco Reverberi’s freaky, ritualistic score. Yeah!

In other circumstances, such an endeavour could have emerged as simply unwatchable (and many would no doubt claim ‘Black Magic Rites’ is just that), but, even for the less fanatical viewer, the film’s aesthetic pleasures and unexpected outbursts of beauty certainly help to sweeten the pill.

‘Black Magic Rites’ was shot in Italian weirdo horror’s home-from-home, the 15th century Castello Piccolomini in Balsorano, previously home to everyone from The Crimson Executioner to Lady Frankenstein, and it must be said, Polselli uses the castello’s potential quite brilliantly in places, especially when he breaks away from the suffocating, colour-saturated gloom of the interiors to stage scenes on the castle battlements, showcasing the astonishing vistas of snow-capped mountains which form the backdrop to the valley in which the castle stands. (1)

A necessary refresher amid all the madness going on down in the ballrooms and dungeons, you can almost smell the fresh air during these sequences, and a similar chill wind of melancholic atmos can also be felt during the funeral / burial sequence I mentioned above, which is really beautifully put together, acting both as a reference to the best scene in Polselli’s earlier The Vampire and the Ballerina, and indeed to its original inspiration, Carl Dreyer’s Vampyr.  

Though I prefer to avoid going into ‘consumer guide’ mode in these reviews, it must be said that the new transfer of the film really helps to highlight the beauty of some of the individual images Polselli and his collaborators conjured up here amidst all the carnage and peek-a-boo nudity and cheap special effects, perhaps helping to lend the whole thing a bit more of a sense of artistry than was really evident in earlier editions. God knows the travails Director of Photography Ugo Brunelli probably had to go through whilst shooting all this stuff, but he certainly delivered the goods in technical terms.

His work, together with Reverberi’s appropriately wigged out yet infernally catchy score (heavy on hand percussion, primitive electronics and reversed/echoed vocal weirdness), work to ensure the film remains an aesthetically intoxicating experience, as well as a simply overpowering one - with this intention often succeeding in spite of Polselli’s feverish, ADHD-afflicted editing and obsession with rubbing our noses in the most unpleasant imagery he can conjure up at any given point.

By far the funniest thing about the new transfer though is that it retains the grandly ornate interval cards from the movie’s original Italian cinema screenings, which I don't recall seeing before. What a hoot! I mean, can you imagine the poor, unsuspecting audience, staggering out into the sunlight for a smoke after 45 minutes of this shit? (“Say pal, whatcha think's gonna happen next?”) 

Simply amazing - as indeed is every aspect of this astounding, unrepeatable film’s genesis, existence and continued survival.

Check it out, please, before the thousand-faced messengers of Azathoth think better of letting it out in the wild, and pull remaining copies through some black trans-dimensional vortex, leaving no trace but a lingering, half-forgotten memory, ready to be shaken off with tomorrow morning’s much needed coffee.

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(1) As I believe I noted in my ‘Lady Frankenstein’ review a few years ago, I’m intrigued by the fact that, of the four noteworthy Italian horror film Mickey Hargitay appeared in, three were shot in the Castello Piccolomini! I mean, was this just a coincidence, or did he live nearby, or know the owners of the castle or something..? Sadly the man himself is no longer with us to provide an answer, but - any insight welcomed.

October Horrors #8:Mania (Renato Polselli, 1974)

Until recently, this 1974 feature from the infamous Renato Polselli – director of ‘The Reincarnation of Isobel’/‘Black Magic Rites’ (1973), ‘Delirium’ (1972) and The Vampire and The Ballerina (1960) – was considered a lost film, with the director himself reportedly claiming that all materials related to the production had been seized by an irate distributor following its (minimal) theatrical release, their fate unknown.

No sightings, screenings, bootlegs or even verifiable rumours regarding the film’s survival leaked out over the next four decades, leaving Euro-cult devotees with little proof that ‘Mania’ had ever existed at all, beyond a poster and a tantalising, battered trailer.

This all changed however in September last year, when, out of the blue, some wonderful, anonymous person posted the entire movie on Youtube, in the form of a rough VHS rip with the opening and end credits removed, seemingly produced as a TV broadcast master at some point in time. Shortly thereafter, the Youtube upload disappeared, but, even more mysteriously, it was subsequently replaced by a much better copy of the film (now with credits), apparently sourced from a film print.

A wave of giddy excitement swept through the dark corners of the messageboard/social media landscape where such things hold currency, and verily, files were ripped, subs translated, uploads uploaded, and the genie was out of the bottle for good. Safely stowed away for posterity on the hard drives of weird film collectors across the globe, ‘Mania’ is lost no more.

Leaving aside the heart-warming tale of its rediscovery however, the good news here is that, whilst it can’t compete with the aforementioned high watermarks in Polselli’s filmography, ‘Mania’ still more than lives up to its name, proving a valuable addition to the extant filmography of one of Italian genre cinema’s most notorious wildmen.

Clearly completed at great speed on a budget that would have made even Franco or Rollin blanch, and populated with a cast of performers unknown to even the most dedicated Euro-cult buffs, ‘Mania’ is utter bottom-of-the-barrel, moving Fumetti kitsch, but cut through with a heavy dose of vicious lunacy. It may not be “good” in any sense of the word, but it’s certainly crazy. Like most of Polselli’s ‘70s films, watching it feels a bit like snorting some unidentified substance at a party and really wishing you hadn’t.

This is particularly true of the opening fifteen minutes, which are rushed through with the impatience of a twitchy lunatic, as we follow an extremely overwrought conversation between a couple (Lailo, played by Iscaro Ravaioli who once appeared as a henchman in Bava’s ‘Danger! Diabolik’, and Lisa, played by Eva Spadaro, who, like most of the cast here, only ever appeared in other Renato Polselli films), who are busy yelling at each other as their car careers dangerously along a cliff top highway at night. Between hysterical bursts of self-pitying infective, Lisa narrates a portion of her personal history, which unfolds before us in flashback.

It seems that Lisa, who sports a cropped, bleach blonde look in the ‘present day’ footage, used to possess a magnificent bouffant, and used to be married to a mad scientist named Brecht, who lived in a crumbling villa somewhere.

Brecht has a moustache worthy of a Bollywood villain, and appears to have a smoking cement mixer in the centre of his basement laboratory, as well as an inordinate fondness for silver foil and bubble-wrap. He claims that he can “control living matter” and “stop a bee in mid-flight”, but he can exercise no such control over his woman, as is made clear when Lisa begins a torrid affair with his identical twin brother(?!), instigated “out of rage” as a means of “insulting his love”, according to the film’s fan-subs.

Following the lead of Brecht’s moustache, the inter-character scenes here have all the subtlety of a Bollywood melodrama, and things head toward craziness more or less straight away, as, warned by the beautiful housemaid Erina (Mirella Rossi) of his wife’s dalliance, Brecht needlessly kills her (the maid, that is) for pretty much no reason whatsoever, suffocating her with a plastic bag in rather sickening fashion… only, wait, hang on, apparently she’s not dead, she’s merely been “reduced to a deaf and dumb mute” by the experience, it says here.

Shortly thereafter, Brecht’s lab explodes into flames, and Lisa, who holds the keys to the locked gates, takes exultant pleasure in watching her husband burned to death as his brother (whom she claims to love) tries desperately to save him. This woman is going to be our heroine for the next seventy minutes, ladies and gentlemen, so put that in yr “the protagonist must be sympathetic” pipe and smoke it.

Back in the present day framing narrative meanwhile, Lisa and Lailo find themselves chased and attacked by a driverless “ghost car”, which Lisa claims is under the control of Brecht’s vengeful spirit, and, so, yeah… it’s going to be one of THOSE films, isn’t it?

Thereafter however, things do calm down considerably, as present day Lisa returns to her husband’s old villa, where, so her tough-love psychiatrist insists, she must confront her fears and overcome them, lest she fall victim to insanity.

Upon her arrival however, she seems liable to fall victim to far worse than that, as it seems Brecht’s now disfigured and wheelchair-bound brother and the now-barely-clothed mute maid-servant are running the joint like a goddamn house of horrors, carrying on about how Il Professori lives on after his physical death, and so forth.

Although ‘Mania’ is entirely lacking in usual visual trappings of gothic horror (presumably for budgetary reasons), the eventual storyline, once it settles down after the deranged opening, is very much in keeping with over-heated Italian gothic psychodramas of yesteryear.

Films such as The Whip & The Body, Nightmare Castle, and, in particular, Riccardo Freda’s ‘The Ghost’ would all seem to be valid reference points here, and for a good long while through its middle section ‘Mania’ essentially functions as a villa-bound, unreliable-narrator-in-peril ghost story, replete with muddy footsteps on the balcony, faces at the window, hands looming out of darkness etc. (Frequent cut away shots of trees shaking in the breeze meanwhile seem a direct call back to Polselli’s own early gothic, ‘The Vampire & The Ballerina’.)

With Polselli at the helm though, things were always going to be pushing toward the far edges of sanity, and sections of the film achieve the same overpowering sense of delirium that helped the director to define the sensibility of Italy’s very best/craziest entries in the Erotic Castle Movie sub-genre in the years immediately preceding his work here.

Events pile up with the strained logic of a nightmare, as if scenes were pieced together entirely at random in post-production, whilst, at all times, the characters remain so hysterical they’re practically on the verge of strangling each other, their actions and reactions baring only to most distant resemble to those of actual human beings.

Although most of the film is curiously devoid of erotic content (which is surprising, given its era and director), one scene during the second half breaks rank and absolutely goes for it, as an insane, naked cat fight break out between the mute Erina and Lisa’s own, oddly robotic maid (Katia, played by Ivana Giordan), each apparently fighting for their mistress’s affections as she looks on.

Although the idea of any of these characters enjoying a Sapphic relationship is never really addressed at any other point in the film, the idea of these two strangely physically/mentally afflicted maids running around in their skimpy night shirts and occasionally scratching each other up in jealousy has a bizarre, pervo Jess Franco kind of vibe to it, and Polselli’s disinclination to exploit this further seem rather curious, given the outrageous content that dominates most of his ‘70s output.*

‘Mania’s music meanwhile is credited to one Umberto Cannone (published by the amusingly named Edizioni Musicali Tickle) and, during the first half of the film, he provides us with an appropriately assaultive palette of bongos, distorted synths, crazy sci-fi effects and bursts of funereal organ.

Towards the end however, a tell-tale Bruno Nicolai-style freakbeat groove takes over, and, by the time Katia is shown making a phone call to Lailo at his home and speaking to him there whilst he is simultaneously lurking about in the villa’s gardens, any remaining pretence at logical storytelling is left far behind as the various characters proceed to chase around and attack each other in various states of rage, fear and confusion for the remainder of the run-time.

Before you know it, Lisa has been trapped in a net(!) and menaced with what look like eels (?!), whilst poor old Erina suffers a gruelling assault by wheelchair, and things get more and more out-to-lunch as we head toward a final 15 minute stretch that’s just as much of a disorientating riot as the opening.

Essentially resembling a ‘60s gothic that has smoked a big pile of ‘70s and gone berserk, ‘Mania’ does suffer from both its obvious budgetary limitations and a fair share of repetitious padding, but if doesn’t quite live up to the brain-melting freak-outs of ‘Delirium’ or ‘Black Magic Rites’, never mind. Those movies set a pretty high bar for such things, after all.

Even as their scrawny, underfed cousin, ‘Mania’ still manages to propel itself into a realm of trash cinema dementia that is more or less beyond criticism, beyond sanity, and quite possibly beyond good and evil too – a finely cracked addition to its creator’s marginal but uniquely twisted legacy. If you’ve yet to sample its pleasures then reach out to the torrents and the .rars my brethren, and drink it in.

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* Although I’ve not seen a copy myself (ahem), I am informed that a photo-novel based on ‘Mania’, published in Italy’s ‘Cinesex’ magazine, provides evidence that the film may once have featured far more extensive sexual content than is seen in the currently extant print, so… make of that what you will, as I don’t suppose clarification will be forthcoming any time soon.

Gothic Originals: The Vampire & The Ballerina (Renato Polselli, 1960)

To us, er, ‘connoisseurs’, Renato Polselli is best known for directing some of the most deranged sex-horror films that emerged from Italy during the 1970s. From Erotic Castle Movie classic ‘The Reincarnation of Isobel’ (aka ‘Black Magic Rites’, 1973) to the appropriately named giallo ‘Delirium’ (1972) and the unspeakable ‘Revelations of a Psychiatrist on the World of Sexual Perversion’ (1974) - if mind-bending sleaze is your thing, Renato is your man. But, everyone has to start somewhere, and Polselli began his journey in ‘le cinema fantastique’ with this early outlier in the Italian gothic horror boom – ‘L'amante del Vampiro’, best known to English-speaking viewers as ‘The Vampire & The Ballerina’.

A close contemporary of Mario Bava’s game-changing ‘Black Sunday’ (which Polselli’s film beat into theatres by about three months if IMDB is to be believed), ‘Vampire & The Ballerina’ is a pretty silly film in and of itself, but nonetheless, it makes a fascinating case study for euro-horror scholars vis-à-vis the way in which it seems to accurately telegraph just about every development that would overtake the genre in the course of the subsequent decade.

From the rote formalisation of gothic cliché (the candelabra walk, the coach journey, the ancestor-painting-that-looks-just-like-the-heroine are all trotted out here in knowing, nudge-wink fashion, despite the film’s early production date), to the inclusion of titillating erotic content that prefigures the slide towards full on sexploitation that would characterise the few castle n’ candle movies still being made in the early ‘70s, ‘Vampire & The Ballerina’ has it all – not to mention the fact that, true to the spirit of decades of Italian horror yet to come, the film’s flimsy narrative seems entirely unconcerned with making what we in English-speaking territories quaintly refer to as “sense”.(1)

So: by means of a moderately accomplished opening sequence in which buxom stable maid falls victim to a be-cloaked vampire, we are introduced to our main location – that being a ballet academy apparently operating out of a well-appointed farmhouse in the middle of an idyllic rural locale.

Even by the standards of horror movie private girls’ schools, there’s not a great deal of academic discipline on display in this institution, and, once the stressful business of receiving the body of a murder victim in the front parlour and somberly mumbling about who might be responsible is dealt with, the female students soon return to their usual routine of lounging around in nightgowns and frilly undies, indulging in ceaseless nattering and giggling that, though it is only intermittently sub-titled on the Italian language print I’m watching, does not appear to portray the intellectual capacity of the nation’s young womanhood in a very positive light.

One of the girls seems to be openly carrying on an affair with school’s open-shirted lothario piano player, whilst another is romantically linked to the straight-laced son of the ‘Professor’ who seems to be running the joint. God only knows what kind of ‘ballet’ the prof is prepping his students for here, but his input chiefly seems to consist of sitting in an armchair smoking his pipe as he watches the girls perform libidinous chorus girl-style routines to ‘stripper jazz’ library cues in the middle of a carpeted living room scarcely very well equipped for ballet practice.

After several reels of this sort of thing, the aforementioned son-of-prof and a couple of the girls head off on a bit of a frolic in the beatific woodland surrounding the school and find themselves sheltering from a storm in the local shunned and abandoned medieval castle. Therein, they are surprised to make the acquaintance of a Bathory-esque Countess in dusty period clothing who invites them to dinner, and, well… you know where things are heading from there, more or less, thus allowing me to mercifully curtail the ‘synopsis’ segment of this review and move on to more important matters.

Though no actual nudity or love scenes are present, ‘erotic’ content in ‘The Vampire & The Ballerina’ is about as strong as it was possible to get in a commercially released film in 1960, with much of the run-time in the first half dedicated to footage of the girls offering titillating glimpses of their underclothes, whilst the several lengthy dance sequences see the camera concentrating almost entirely upon their fishnet-clad legs and buttocks. As is so often the case with ‘60s European cinema, most of the female cast look like they’ve been beamed down directly from some angelic modelling agency of hetero-male dreams, and, basically, there’s enough artfully presented cheesecake here to give any self-respecting lingerie fetishist a minor seizure.

Knowing as we do of Polselli’s later career, it is easy to read this movie (moreso than anything, say, Jess Franco was making at the time) as the work of a future sex film director straining at the leash in an era that prohibited him from making actual sex films. And, sadly, you can forget any idea of there being any Meyer-esque self-critique of the male gaze going on here either. Female characters remain largely undifferentiated and devoid of agency throughout, whilst Polselli’s directorial leering is just plain shameless, creating an aura of thoughtless, low level misogyny that some viewers will likely find more objectionable than that found in any number of later, more overtly explicit films of this nature.

Another way in which ‘Vampire & The Ballerina’ anticipates it’s director’s future is via the sketchy, semi-improvised plotting and general sense of narrative disintegration, which continued through most of his ‘70s output. Quite how such a minimal, undercooked storyline can still manage to generate so many loose ends and unnecessary diversions is as big a mystery as anything that’s actually transpiring on-screen, and indeed, the film does occasionally succeed in passing beyond the gates of logic into that magic realm so beloved of us Euro-horror devotees, wherein the viewer forgets what’s supposed to be happening at any given moment and simply floats downstream oblivious, drifting from one delirious set-piece to the next. Good times.

Like Paolo Heusch’s ostensibly similar Werewolf in a Girls’ Dormitory, I enjoyed the fairytale-like manner in which young characters keep walking into ‘the woods’, there to encounter a whole other world of dangerous new experiences, although it must be said that that metaphor loses its power somewhat given the wealth of free and easy sexuality already on offer back in the safety of the ballet school, whilst the thin story and uneven atmosphere fail to ever really achieve the level of mystery or threat necessary to sign off on such a potentially weighty theme.

And, that failure this leads us conveniently onto ‘Vampire & The Ballerina’s big downfall as a horror film – namely, the fact that whilst the ballerinas are generally present and correct, the vampire is bloody hopeless; truly one of the stupidest looking bloodsuckers ever seen on screen. Armed with a white fright wig, clownish eye make-up and a deeply crappy one-piece rubber mask, this cat looks like an amateur theatre-level cross between Grandpa Munster and Lon Chaney’s Hunchback, but without the charisma of either. The scenes in which he features are pretty much destroyed by his ridiculous get-up and cartoonish demeanor, whilst the sight of this somewhat geriatric weirdo fondling and neck-biting his lady victims is distinctly unappetizing – a total fail with regard to evoking the ‘vampire as sexual predator’ mythos that a film like this should surely be aiming for.

In between all the lightweight comedy bickering and schlocky vampire bits though, there are occasional stylish and evocative moments here that make it worth sitting things out, particularly in the first half of film, where Polselli frequently cuts away to eerie footage of tree branches blowing in the wind, running water, and other such things that serve to add uncanny sentience to the natural environment around the characters and also perhaps to reflect the oneiric, cyclical drift of the near-somnambulant storyline. Or, more likely, could just be a cheap trick to fill some space and build inexpensive ‘atmos’ by pointing the camera up or down for a few minutes after shooting a scene, but either way, it’s a nice, Franco-esque touch of the kind that I’m usually a sucker for.

(At this point, it is worth noting that the use of locations in ‘Vampire & The Ballerina’ is excellent – both the convincingly ruinous looking castle used for both interiors and exteriors and the tangled woodlands surrounding it add greatly to the film’s atmosphere.)

It is between a rush of these moody transition shots that by far my favourite sequence in the film commences, beginning as we suddenly see a somber funeral procession slowly stomping its way uphill to a weather-beaten medieval chapel - one of those strange moments often encountered in cheaper Italian and Spanish gothic horrors where, for a few brief seconds, the veneer of fantasy crumbles and we catch a genuine glimpse of the haunted, ancient Catholic Europe that was gradually disappearing with the onset of modernity at around the time these films were being made.

And, straight out of that, Polselli flips the script once more, throwing us into an absolutely terrific Hitchcock-via-Corman set piece in which we see the girl in the coffin (a victim of the vampire of course) suddenly open her eyes in a shock reawakening, as she stares upward through the coffin’s glass viewing window. Mixing claustrophobic close-ups of the victim’s anguished face with matching POV shots of the forest groves and open sky looming above her, and the mourners bending over the coffin as it is lowered into the ground, this really is a “buried alive” sequence to beat the band, and speaks well for Polselli’s abilities as a striking and innovative director, when he was in the mood.(2)

Admittedly, you could legitimately wonder why those mourners peering at the coffin don’t notice that the woman inside is now staring up at them very much alive, but hey - if there’s one thing I've learned about Polselli by now, it’s that he does not give a fuck about little details like that clouding his grand vision.

If only that kind of verve and imagination could have been applied to more evenly to the rest of the film, perhaps we’d be looking at pretty great slice of early Euro-horror here, but sadly it’s not to be, as anything involving the rubber-faced count and his vampire brides (whose joke-shop fangs are so big they can’t even close their mouths) swiftly devolves into tongue in cheek hokum, camera static and directorial vision thoroughly AWOL, dragging us back down to earth with a bump.

And to extend that metaphor, it’s unfortunate that the closing twenty minutes of ‘Vampire & The Ballerina’ pretty much nail our feet to the floor, as the pressing need to conclude the ‘story’ (which all right-thinking viewers will frankly forgotten about half an hour back) regrettably banishes mystery and delirium to the margins. A decade later, directors like Polselli had learned to just throw caution to the wind and give in to the chaos, but, this was 1960, and the powers that be seemingly demanded a happy ending, with monsters both explained and vanquished.

Beyond just the shitty make-up job on the vampires (a problem numerous other ‘60s horror directors overcame with gusto) and the iffy production design choices (the wide shot of the crypt was cool, but c’mon guys, the spring-loaded coffin lids and polystyrene skulls were a bit much), ‘Vampire & The Ballerina’s main problem I think is that it just isn’t quite willing to commit to being a full-on horror film.

All that was needed was clearly on hand in terms of talent and resources, but the half-arsed silliness that pre-dominates suggests that, despite the success of Hammer a few years earlier, the filmmakers still didn’t quite have the guts to embrace the genre the way Bava did a few months later, resulting in a campy detachment from the material that is unfortunate to say the least.

As such, the obligatory concluding chapter, in which the two male leads dutifully stomp off to the castle to confront the vampires and reclaim their womenfolk, is about as prosaic and pedestrian as such a thing can possibly be – a yawnsome recitation of the expected cliché (basically just another play-by-play re-run of the conclusion to Hammer’s ‘Dracula’), devoid of the wayward unpredictability and off-key sauciness that enlivened the earlier sections of the film. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.

Whilst far too sloppy and uneven to be considered essential viewing for anyone on earth, ‘Vampire & The Ballerina’ still manages to make for a fascinating curio as an early example of the way in which sex and horror could be mixed up to dreamy and disorientating effect, and for all its faults, it still spells eighty minutes of solid fun for those of us who covet the dizzying perfume of that particular brew. To conclude, let’s publicly mark it down as a “mixed bag”, and then get on with secretly watching it ten times when there’s no one around to pass judgment. You know where I’m coming from on that one, I’m sure.

(1) In regards to this, it is worth noting that ‘Vampire & The Ballerina’ marks the debut writing credit of the ubiquitous Ernesto Gastaldi, whose uniquely unhinged way with a typewriter went on to pretty much define the shadier quarters of Italian popular cinema for the next twenty years, in a career that ranged from L'orribile Segreto del Dr. Hichcock and The Whip & The Body to ‘Almost Human’ and ‘2019: After the Fall of New York’, taking in more landmark productions than I could possibly list here.

(2) Online reading leads me to believe that this ‘buried alive’ sequence is actually a direct rip from Carl Dreyer’s ‘Vampyr’ (1932), a film I’ve not seen since I checked it out on a near unwatchable Redemption VHS release many years back, and basically remember very little about. Oh well, that’s what I get for being an uncultured swine.