Mania (1974)

Directed by:

"Ralph Brown" (Renato Polselli)

By using radiation to target nervous systems, the intense Professor Brecht (Brad Euston) can stop a bee in mid-air, which somehow convinces him he can use it on all other living beings. He slaves away in his basement lab hoping to eventually use his invention to cure any illness in the human body. While he's preoccupied with that, his neglected wife Lisa (Eva Spadaro) has been keeping busy getting busy with Brecht's identical twin brother, Germano (also Euston). And she hasn't an ounce of guilt over it. In fact, she openly admits to getting off on other people's misery, pitting people against one another and even makes an aside that watching people die turns her on. What a charming lady she is!

While Lisa and Germano mess around on the patio, Erina the maid (Mirella Rossi) tries to stop Brecht from coming upstairs and seeing them. He repays her for her kindness by suffocating her with a plastic bag until she's spitting up blood. Though Erina survives, she's now been "reduced to a deaf and dumb mute" and proves to be dumb in more ways than one as she just continues to live with these nutbags! While Brecht feels a little guilty about attacking Erina he's completely indifferent to Lisa's affair, which infuriates her. To get back at him for his lack of outrage, she locks him in the lab when a fire breaks out. Germano manages to break inside but is only able to pull out his brother's burning corpse while he gets part of his face burnt off.

The above tale is told via flashback by a frantic, paranoid and constantly screaming Lisa, who's convinced her dead husband is still after her. Her new lover / fiancé, Lailo (Isarco Ravaioli), who was one of the husband's students, tries to talk sense into her but she's not having it. The two are pursued down a country road by a white car that appears to have no driver and tries to make them crash. They even find the car pulled off to the side at one point, go to investigate and find there's no one driving. It then suddenly starts up and tries to run them over. Lailo only seems mildly concerned and I'm not sure why he keeps letting Lisa drive either. She's hysterical, speeding and swerving all over the place to the point where she keeps running off the road, hitting guardrails and almost even sends them over a cliff. She never uses her fucking brakes and keeps shrieking the entire time. It's so damn irritating!

The two finally make it to a house where Lisa continues flipping her shit and then tries to strangle her live-in nurse Katia (Ivana Giordan) because she accepted a package someone left there (?!) Lisa is taken to see a psychiatrist (Max Dorian), who fails at his job when he doesn't immediately lock her up and throw away the key. Instead, he recommends she return to the villa where her husband died and is now entombed (in the basement!) to overcome her mental issues. Katia decides to accompany her unhinged pal there, presumably because she has a death wish. The fire-scarred Germano (who has a withered arm and is now in a wheelchair) and Erina (who runs around the grounds wearing nothing but a dress shirt) are still around. Lailo shows up but Lisa, wanting to overcome her fears all by herself, demands he leave. The two make an agreement: He'll go but she's to call him daily with updates.

Footprints appear and then disappear and then reappear again on the terrace. The phone stops working and then starts working again and then becomes electrified. The power goes out and comes back on randomly. Lisa has visions of a hanging corpse, a face in the fire, a laughing, gray-painted ghost face and a burnt hand reaching for her. No one else seems to be seeing what she is... at least not at first. Not only would Brecht's ghost have a bone to pick with her but so would Germano. He'd been her lover for three years before she split and now that he's disfigured she wants nothing to do with him. She also has it in the back of her mind that her nurse and fiancé are possibly conspiring against her. Or is she merely insane?

Thrown into the works are a maggoty corpse, a random electric eel attack (?!), a neck slashed with a broken bottle, a head bashed in with a candelabra, a hilariously cheap looking death trap that threatens to crush two of the women between a thin sheet of aluminum siding and Erina getting run over by the wheelchair. Twice. There's also a moronic twist at the end and, as per the director's usual, such sleazy accompaniments as a naked cat fight, mild lesbianism, whipping and one of the girls running around the entire time wearing an unbuttoned shirt but no pants, underwear or bra, which put this out of contention for a Best Costume Design Oscar nomination.

After its brief theatrical run in 1974, this disappeared for decades and wasn't even released on video in its home country. Many thought it was lost until a censored print (which is missing some of the more graphic sex scenes and runs about 82 minutes) turned up in 2007. Shame then that this is so tedious and mostly takes place at a single boring location. There are lots of zoom shots, eyeball close-ups and camera tilts, plus about a hundred cutaway shots to tall trees swaying in the breeze. The constant hysterics and bug-eyed overacting get to be a bit much and the characters are all extremely unlikable, especially the leading lady we have to deal with the entire time.

Polselli directed a number of other genre films like THE VAMPIRE AND THE BALLERINA (1960), The Monster of the Opera (1964), DELIRIUM (1972), The Truth According to Satan (1972), The Reincarnation of Isabel (1973) and House of Love... The Police Intervene (1978). His movies got progressively sleazier as he went along, culminating in him shooting hardcore films, including several bestiality pornos. Claudio Fragasso (Troll 2) was the assistant director.

★1/2

Che wan (1983)

... aka: Accident, The
... aka: Blood of the Black Dog
... aka: Car Spirit
... aka: Che hun

Directed by:
Pao-Lun Lu

Man-Tik Chow (Eddie Chan), the rich asshole owner of a toy manufacturing company, could care less about anything other than the bottom line. One of his employees stays up all night working on a  new Rolls Royce car toy, but Man-Tik disapproves of the design and chucks it out the window of his high rise office. On the street below, 8-year-old Siu-Ching (Bo-Ming Ma) is walking home from school and is saved from the falling toy by chubby factory worker Fatty Cheng (Kent Cheng). Fatty accompanies the girl home only to find she's living in a shack in poverty. Siu-Ching's father had been killed in a car accident and her mother is deathly ill, suffers from terrible migraines and is always moaning for her “headache pills.” The widow is just barely managing to scrape by, so Fatty befriends them, becomes a fixture in the home, brings them food, gives them money and eventually agrees to become the girl's godfather in case something happens to the sickly mother.

After spending the evening at a nightclub drinking and watching nude strippers while entertaining an American client, Man-Tik, accompanied by his wife Ying (Chiu-hua Wei), his assistant Mr. Mak (Fong Chow) and factory manager Mr. Lam (Siao San-Yan), who was seen earlier chewing out a worker even after he crushes him hand in a machine, head back home on a dark and stormy night. Siu-Ching, in a hurry to get her mom some medicine, steps out in front of them and is mowed over... and on the night before her 9th birthday, no less. Since Man-Tik was driving drunk, he and the others decide to just take off and leave the dead girl behind on the side of the road. This will naturally end up coming back to haunt each of them when they're cursed and face the wrath of a vengeful ghost who won't stop until they're all dead.

Ying starts suffering from crazy hallucinations and nightmares, including having her eyeball gouged out with a straight razor. Rumors quickly spread around town that the Siu-Ching's ghost has been spotted walking around town at night still looking for medicine. Starting to get concerned, the four there on the night of her death then go to a temple to get a blessing and discover they've all been marked with a death omen. Both a dog and Man-Tik's car, which starts driving around town all by itself, become possessed. Handyman Chan (Gam Biu) is the first to die (via a bottle of booze turned into acid) because he helped to hide the crime by washing the blood off the car. And then Man-Tik's two underlings die; one after becoming locked in his office and burning to death after being pummeled by animated toys and the other by impalement after envisioning himself being attacked by a group of deranged surgeons who first cut the stomach out of a naked woman (!) Ying is eventually driven to seek spiritual help in an effort to save both herself and her husband.

The above takes up about an hour... and I wasn't impressed with it at all. While some of the individual scenes were enjoyably strange, the whole thing just wasn't holding together that well. The messy blending of trite “revenge-from-beyond-the-grave” plotting, annoyingly over-the-top melodrama, unlikable characters, misplaced comedy elements and a general lack of focus (Fatty is treated as the lead character and then almost completely forgotten) just wasn't doing it for me. But then something amazing happened in the final 20 minutes: It suddenly became awesome!

Old lady exorcist Sister Ling Sin (Fong Ping) and her young (and naked!) assistant finally show up in a last ditch effort to save Ying and Man-Tik and the film improves significantly from there. Since Man-Tik is slated to meet his end on the "Night of the Dog," Ling Sin immediately gets to work on various black magic spells to counteract the evil. She hangs a black dog upside down, slashes its throat, collects its blood in a bowl and then sends Ying to the mortuary to sprinkle the blood over Siu-Ching's corpse. While Ying is away, Sister Sin and her assistant manage to destroy the car and then have to face off against Man-Tik, who becomes possessed by the devil! There's a body painting sequence (complete with music clearly in reference to ROSEMARY'S BABY), huge fireballs, zombies, a nude woman having spell paper attached to her tits and vag blow up before being beaten up and then thrown through a window, a field of fiery crosses, blood being spit directly in a face and even a gory crucifixion. It's all pretty crazy and entertaining.

This is a very hard-to-come-by film that currently doesn't even have five votes on IMDb. It has never been officially released in America or any other country outside of Asia to my knowledge. What I viewed was an extremely substandard VHS rip. While it has burnt-in English subtitles, these are very difficult to read at times because they're often cut off and are white and often drowned out by glaring light. To make matters much worse, there's also a “Distributed by: Eternity” watermark in huge white letters that's on the screen much of the time and right on top of the subs! The movie was shot pretty colorfully (green lighting is used a LOT) but it's hard to appreciate any style with this crappy print. Still, Weird Asia fans are gonna want to check this out. The director also made the rare vampire movie Gui huo aka The Gate of Hell (1981).

★★1/2