7, Hyden Park: la casa maledetta (1985)

... aka: Formula for a Killer
... aka: Formula for a Murder
... aka: Formula per un assassinio
... aka: Seven Hyden Park

Directed by:
Alberto De Martino

Boston, 1960: 11-year-old Joanna is attacked by a sex predator dressed as a priest, falls down a flight of stairs and breaks her back. Cut to the present day and the now-grown Joanna (Christina Nagy) is confined to a wheelchair but isn't letting that stop her from living a normal life. She's repressed all her memories from the childhood attack and doesn't remember anything about it, is heavily involved in athletics and has acquired a great deal of money over the years, some of which she's sinking into research to find a cure for paralysis. Craig (David Warbeck), an athletic director at a sports center for the crippled, falls in love with her and wants to marry her but Joanna's sexy, overly-protective live-in assistant Ruth (Carroll Blumenberg) starts getting jealous of the romance and fears her boss will cast her to the side if she goes through with the marriage. Fearing for the life of his patient, her concerned physician Doctor Sernich (Rossano Brazzi) tells Craig about what had happened to Joanna in her childhood and warns that her remembering those traumatic events may provoke a fatal heart attack.

Joanna decides to go through with the union and the two are quickly married in a civil ceremony. Craig promptly moves in and Ruth moves out to live in her own place. Joanna starts screaming and freaking out when Craig tries to make love to her, has terrible nightmares and, while she's alone at the house, a man dressed as a priest with pantyhose over his face and carrying a bloody doll, appears at the top of the stairs. Joanna passes out and the incident is passed off as a hallucination. Meanwhile, a psycho is murdering priests at a church Joanna donates a lot of money to. Father Peter (Andrea Bosic) gets his throat cut with a straight razor in a confessional booth, while Father Davis (Loris Loddi) gets his face smashed in with a shovel. Both bodies disappear.

Oddly, the identity of the killer or killers and his, her or their motivation(s) are unveiled about half an hour into this one, though I won't reveal either here. Not that it would really spoil the film or anything. Just from reading the plot synopsis and the fact the central character is a vulnerable, rich woman with a past trauma and a weak heart will be enough for most to guess the who and why. You keep waiting for something out of the ordinary to occur or for an unpredictable plot twist to swing the action in another direction, but nothing ever happens. The ordinary writing is enlivened a little by an eerie music score from Francesco De Masi, OK performances, a few bloody murders and some faintly creepy "hallucinations;" though none of that really lifts this above the realm of passable time-waster. The ending gets a little silly and over-the-top, too, as it attempts to pile on the shocks.

Director De Martino (billed here as "Martin Herbert") had made around 30 films from 1962 until 1985 and never managed to distinguish himself at all during that time. His films ranged from the awful (the bad movie favorite The Puma Man [1980]) to the serviceable (this one; the 1982 thriller Blood Link starring Michael Moriarty), though nothing memorable seemed to ever come out of the chute. His other work includes peplum and crime thrillers, plus the b/w Gothic horror The Blancheville Monster (1963), the giallo The Killer is on the Phone (1972), the Exorcist cash-in The Antichrist (1974), the Omen cash-in Holocaust 2000 (1977) and the low-budget monster film Miami Horror (1985), which also featured Warbeck and Loddi. Formula was issued to VHS on the Lightning label here in America, though I'm unaware of any official DVD release.

★★1/2

L'anticristo (1974)

... aka: Antichrist, The
... aka: Blasphemy
... aka: Tempter, The

Directed by:
Alberto De Martino

One of at least a dozen devil / demon / evil spirit possession films to emerge immediately after The Exorcist, this one has better production values than most, but that doesn't mean it's actually any better. In fact, it's ineffectual and often being just plain boring. At the tender age of 12, Ippolita was involved in a car crash that killed her mother and left her crippled. Now as an adult, Ippolita (short-haired Carla Gravina) is lonely, bitter and resentful. After all, she's spent a good deal of her life trying and failing to find a cure for whatever psychosomatic maladies are keeping her from walking. She also feels that God has failed to help her and has turned her back on her beliefs. Any ill feelings she felt for her wealthy father Massimo (Mel Ferrer), whose negligence led to the car crash years earlier, have manifested themselves as incestuous desires toward him that grow more intense once daddy's love will have to be split between her and his new girlfriend Gretel (Anita Strindberg). So it's safe to assume that Ippolita's one fucked-up chick. And things are about to get even worse!

A possessed man (Ernesto Colli) kills himself at a sacred site Ippolita and her father visit, resulting in the evil spirit hand picking our heroine as the perfect vessel to inhabit. After all, 400 years earlier she was a witch who was captured and burned at the stake. Symptoms manifest themselves slowly. Actually, too damn slowly. But then, Ippolita finds herself having a bizarre nightmare where her former witchy self had gone through a Satanic initiation involving getting laid out on a table nude and having a guy in a horned mask make her slurp some blood, eat a frog's head and lick a goat's... Well, no need for gory details.

Afterward, Ippolita regains her ability to walk. She uses her newfound freedom to seduce a teenage boy and twist his head around backwards then returns home to act out in all the usual possessed ways. She says lots of vulgar, degrading things, levitates, drools, pukes, makes furniture and paintings move and lights flicker and tries to seduce her own brother, Filippo (Remo Girone). During one scene, she detaches her own hand and uses it to strangle a faith healer (Mario Scaccia) her God-fearin' maid Irene (Alida Valli) brings over. Eventually, and with some help from Ippolita's bishop uncle (Arthur Kennedy), a more qualified fellow (George Coulouris) is dragged in the predictable exorcism climax where Ippy pukes, is doused with holy water and finally gets outside the home and tries to kill herself.

There's an effective score by Ennio Morricone and Bruno Nicolai, nice exterior location work in Rome, very good interior art direction (including a hallway full of stone busts sticking out of the walls) and sharp and sometimes striking cinematography courtesy of Aristede Massaccesi (better known to us yanks as Joe D'Amato). What really sinks the whole thing is that there's not a single likable character to be found in the entire film. Irregardless of her situation, Ippolita is so miserable, bitchy, spoiled and self-absorbed it's impossible to warm to her. Other characters tend to be uninteresting, generic and/or underwritten. The special effects are a mixed bag too, leaning toward unimpressive, with disappointingly minor possession makeups.

Scenes were trimmed for the original U.S. theatrical release (under the title Blasphemy) as well as the VHS release (as The Tempter). The uncut DVD version was released by Anchor Bay.

★★

Blood Link (1982)

...aka: Blood Link - Blutspur

...aka: Extrasensorial

...aka: Link, The

Directed by:

Alberto De Martino

Here's a pretty decent horror-thriller (an Italian/ U.S./ West German co-production); some even include this title on their list of gialli. Dr. Craig Mannings (Michael Moriarty) suffers from disturbing, blurry visions of killing women he's never met before. His psycho, impotent identical twin brother Keith (also played by Moriarty), believed to have been killed in a fire many years back, is actually responsible. The two were Siamese twins at one point, were separated and now share a "bond," seeing everything through each other’s eyes. Moriarty is excellent in this dual role. When Craig travels to Germany (home of his brother) the understandably confused local cops pin the murder rap on him. There are some plot holes here, but this movie deserves better treatment (and distribution) that what it's had. It's interesting throughout, well photographed, has a fun (but small) role for Cameron Mitchell (as Bud Waldo, an aging boxer/victim), is full of female nudity (including Ohio-born 1973 Playboy Playmate Martha Smith) and has an Ennio Morricone score. Penelope Milford (not long after her Oscar nomination for COMING HOME and playing the good doctor's girlfriend) and Sarah Langenfeld (Mitchell's daughter) co-star, and Geraldine Fitzgerald and Virginia McKenna both have small roles.

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There's no DVD release for this one yet and the Embassy video release (which came out in 1985) is long out-of-print.

★★1/2