Challenge the Devil

Words almost fail to describe my enthusiasm when I stumbled upon a copy of this "Katarsis", aka "Challenge the Devil". A fully restored version on BluRay is available in the fancy boxset "The Eurocrypt of Christopher Lee". It's quite expensive, but hey, an ultra-rare gothic Italian movie from the early sixties, and starring the almighty Lee can't be bad, right? Well, unfortunately not, and even a film like this is obscure and forgotten for a good reason.

All the main issues of this film, and they are quite plentiful, can basically be brought back to one major and incomprehensible default. "Katarsis" - seemingly - didn't have a script. During the credits, and nor here on IMDb, there isn't anyone listed as writer. So, what I imagine, is that director Giuseppe Veggezzi (who apparently never did anything else in the film industry) gave instructions to his cast like: "Just do something. Whatever. Improvise, people!".

The absence of a script would explain a lot, though. "Katarsis" is - hands down - the world champion of useless, endless, and irritating padding footage! Although barely 80 minutes long, minimally 20 minutes of those are pure filler. Boring dance acts, entire songs, random party footage... all lasting for several long minutes. Even the process of going up a flight of stairs is stretched eternally. Ironically enough, the group going up the stairs also says: this seems to take forever! Even worse, however, is the unfathomable and surreal narrative structure of "Katarsis". It makes absolutely no sense, whatsoever.

It starts with two hired assassins going after a man. They shoot him, and the wounded man seeks refugee in a monastery where he knows one of the monks. The man tells the monk the killers were after him for documents that his ex-girlfriend stole. The monk goes to the nightclub where the ex-girlfriend (a hideous woman) works. Out of the blue, the monk starts telling her why he became a monk via a flashback. Apparently, he used to be a ruthless thug, and together with five others, they broke into a castle and stumbled upon an old man. Hey, there we finally have Christopher Lee! But he's gone again after five minutes... At the request of the old man, who may be the Devil himself, they roam around the castle in search for a woman. And, surprise, the six hoodlums turn into remorseful young people.

Seriously, what is this?!? Craziest. Trash. Ever.

I'm nevertheless giving "Katarsis" one point extra, solely because Christopher Lee has three different faces in hardly five minutes of screentime. Oh, and the little twist-ending about Lee's character real identity is reasonably ingenious, but it doesn't save anything.

As other reviewers have noted, it was apparently shot without a script and grafted on to another unfinished movie. Christopher Lee is the attraction here, but even he can't salvage this doomed production. Its incomparable awfulness encompases: 1) the single worst acting performance ever committed to film (Ardisson, as "Gugo," itself an unforgettable travesty); 2) the flabby has-been stripper Alma De Rio stumbling through a dance in which she waddles drunkenly while wiggling her hefty avordupois (without removing a stitch, thank God); and, 3) a solo guitar dirge opening "theme" that sounds like a 10 year-old trying to pick out a tune on an instrument for the first time. Execrable and stupefying, like watching an animal eating another animal's vomit.or feces.

When you read through the IMDB trivia for this film, you no doubt will understand much of why I hated the story. It seems that the original production company ran out of money and the film was sold to another company. They in turn chopped the movie to pieces and added a lot of new material. The sum total of this is a story that seems disjoint and dull.

The story begins in a nightclub. Many of the women in the place are striking but not in good ways. They look much like some of Fellini's weird characters or those from a John Waters film. THen a monk enters the place and tells a story...a not so clever way of joining the two bits of movie.

It seems a group of six jerks are driving about the countryside in their tiny convertibles causing all sorts of trouble....drinking while driving, running people off the road and just acting like folks who need to be taught a less. A bit later, they arrive at a castle and begin treating the place like garbage. An old man in a strange period costume (Christopher Lee) arrives and he blathers a bit. Later, he reveals himself to be the devil.

The story is dull and confusing and lost my interest very quickly. Inexplicably, in reading through the reviews some people liked it. There's no accounting for tastes.

After meeting with an old friend, a monk goes to visit a former member of his friend group for help in recalling an experience years ago, where he and his friends decided to visit an eerie castle while out looking for some fun, and discover the demonic host and his deadly plans.

Overall, this was a generally dull and lifeless Gothic horror effort. What tends to be the best part here is the general atmosphere of the castle once the group arrives and sets about staying there. After the first half, getting to the point of the story where it's all revealed in flashback, where the group barges into the castle and begins to explore it, which is what allows this one to meet the requirements of the gene involving the presence of the dark, empty castle filled with thick cobwebs, barely-lit candelabras, and a thick air of neglect. Spurned on by this and the rampant food and drink available, their party seems all the more understandable as they fail to realize their host is in the room with them and sending them out on a quest to uncover a specific body within the castle as this provides the bulk of the film where they wander around the various rooms and hallways, lit only by their candles and filled with cobwebs and medieval decorations, looking for the spectral figure of their quest. This is chilling and atmospheric and comes together well enough to be quite likable, but beyond that, there isn't much to this one. The main issue here is the utterly inconsequential and useless padding that goes on before the film even comes close to getting started. While this is mostly explained by background information on the production, that still doesn't excuse the mindnumbing sequences placed here to counteract the lack of running time with the scenes being uninteresting and unimportant to the final film since there's no reason why we're forced to follow this spy thriller stalking the one guy, the trips to the nightclub to meet up with the girlfriend, or the scenes involving the priest trying to explain what's going on. It all makes for a difficult time caring about anything when it's not that important to the film proper, and with the group initially portrayed as the careless thugs they are before they arrive at the castle, this is even more apparent. Moreover, the reason why they should undertake the mission in the castle is quite flimsy and makes little sense, and the scenes have an atmospheric touch through the location and concept, for the actual execution is interminably overlong without much of anything happening. With a cheap look that doesn't help matters, this is a slow and generally unimpressive genre effort.

Today's Rating/PG-13: Violence and Language.

This is definitely Christopher Lee's most obscure European genre effort and, in retrospect, one of the weakest from any phase in his prolific career – in fact, I would even venture to name it the worst entry in the Gothic Horror cycle emanating from Italy! Incidentally, the copy I watched was culled from a recent late-night screening on Italian TV – its first ever broadcast (where the on-screen title was the alternate one SFIDA AL DIAVOLO) which, given the dire results, is not surprising! Truth be told, the genre icon's presence (or its three stages, since he goes from the reclusive pathetic owner of a decaying mansion – his fair hair unintentionally evoking Shakespeare's Hamlet, in whose celebrated 1948 film version Lee had actually appeared in a bit-part! – to a dark Mephistophelean figure and, finally, revealed to be the previously imperceptible victim of a mugging) within the film hardly amounts to 10 minutes of its 76-minute running-time!

The film starts off as a lame chase thriller with pious undertones, is stopped dead in its tracks by a slew of pointless musical numbers, then turns into a hedonistic drama on the lines of (but a long way after) THESE ARE THE DAMNED (1963) – with the best-known member of the younger cast, Giorgio Ardisson, actually the one to ham it up most relentlessly! – before settling into some typical haunted-house antics (with some cob-webbed interiors and scuttling creatures notching up a few points for Cocteau-like atmosphere). The mix could have actually proved quite interesting but, since director Veggezzi (whose name was unfamiliar to me – and it did not take long to discover why) displayed remarkable incompetence throughout, the end result is almost on a par with the notorious work of Ed Wood!