L'ossessa (1974)

... aka: Devil Obsession, The

... aka: Eerie Midnight Horror Show, The

... aka: Enter the Devil

... aka: Exorcisation

... aka: La poseida (The Possessed)

... aka: L'ossessa - Das Omen des Bösen (The Obsessed - The Omen of Evil)

... aka: Obsessed, The

... aka: Sexorcist, The

... aka: Tormented, The

... aka: Verteufelt (Demonized)

Directed by:

Mario Gariazzo

College student / art restorer Danila (Stella Carnacina) visits a de-consecrated old church and helps orchestrate the removal of one of the statues: a creepy, dirty crucified man (not Jesus!) carved out of an olive tree. The statue, which is bizarrely detailed and almost lifelike, is then taken to her university where colleagues plan to study it and clean it up. Outside of her art obsession, Danila may come from money but her home life still isn't the greatest. Her architect father Mario (Chris Avram) is an oblivious pushover too busy with work to pay anything much mind while her philandering mother Luisa (Lucretia Love) is carrying on a BDSM relationship with her sleazy sadistic lover (Gabriele Tinti). While her family is throwing a party, Danila catches mum in one such tryst, writhing on bed in ecstasy as he whips her bloody with thorny rose stems ("Harder darling, please!"). Disturbed by the sight, she runs off to the art department to work on a painting. While her back is turned, the statue starts bleeding and comes to life in the form of Ivan Rassimov's Satan, who promptly rips her dress off, throws her on the floor and then has sex with her while a cross burns behind them. Next thing Danila knows, she's clothed and sitting back at her painting.

Though she can't figure out whether or not she was actually ravaged by the wood (carving), one thing's for sure: Something evil is after her. An unseen force pursues her up the stairs, possesses her and starts making her do a frenzied masturbation routine in front of a door. It gets her so hot and bothered, she even makes a pass at her own father ("There's no such thing as incest! It's only the invention of priests!") and has to be slapped out of it. She's given a mild sedative by a doctor, who recommends the family take a vacation in the country... but even that backfires. After they get a flat tire, Danila wanders off to an old church where she has visions of a white-painted priestess, who gives her some potion made from crushed black communion wafers, and Satan, who pulls himself back off the cross long enough to gorily crucify her. She wakes back up in bed shrieking. Another nightmare? Sort of.

The doctor is called back in and examines Danila. She now has the signs of stigmata on her wrists and feet. Even with all of this freakishness going on, the parents continue to argue about other things like their shitty marriage. Dad calls mom a slut, says she's failed as a mother and chastises her for indulging in "masochistic tomfoolery." She, on the other hand, tries to make amends by dumping her lover, but he's not going to go away quietly. Once the stigmata mysteriously heals in a day, a team of doctors are called in to reexamine the girl. They can find nothing, which prompts a psychiatrist (Umberto Raho) to diagnose her with a bad case of "diabolical possession." Seems about right, especially seeing how Danila loses her shit any time there's a cross or holy person in her vicinity. Just wait until they drag her off to a nunnery!

After a consultation with Reverend Antonio (Piero Gerlini), Danila is dragged off to "The Convent of Our Lady of Sorrow" to be with the nuns, while specially-trained exorcist Father Xeno (Luigi Pistilli), who's been living a quiet, hermetic life up in the mountains for years, is hunted down to perform the exorcism. By the time the priest arrives, Danila has black under eye circles, pale skin, scabby lips and a foamy mouth. She screams constantly, has seizures, beats her head against a headboard and is able to communicate directly to Satan, who coaches her on what to do. Their first tactic is to seduce Xeno, so he turns her back to looking normal and she pleads with him to "Penetrate me!" while licking his hand. Xeno returns to his room and flagellates himself with a cat o' nine tails to prepare for round two, which includes lots of prayer, lots of screaming and lots of puking up something green.

The opening credits claim this is "based on a true story" but the only true story going on here is that The Exorcist became a worldwide phenomenon the previous year and this film wanted to capitalize on it. Even as far as these subpar wannabes go, this one's strictly average. It starts out well enough with the creepy statue idea and features a few good scenes here and there, but it's also oddly restrained in other ways. Sure there's nudity and violence, just not as much as in some of the sleazier films in this category. The biggest disappointment is that Danila never gets to spout ridiculous vulgarities in a deep male voice, which are usually comic highlights of these rip-offs. Rassimov, with a little help from some red contacts and caterpillar eyebrows, makes for an excellent Devil, though.

Though most of the supporting cast is fairly well-known, at least to Euro-trash fans, I was completely unfamiliar with the lead actress. Looking into her career a bit further, I see she was in about a dozen other movies (usually comedies), featured in a nude pictorial in the May 1975 issue of Italian Playboy (she's also on the cover) and then did layouts in other men's magazines like Gente and Skorpio. She was also a singer and released a number of 45s. The modeling, the acting and the music all seemed to abruptly end around 1985.

Someone must have made a fortune off of this because it seems to have been distributed everywhere. I found tons of posters for this one under a multitude of different titles from all over the world...

Here in the U.S. it was released to theaters several times under the titles The Tormented and The Eerie Horror Picture Show (with misleading advertising materials utilizing Rocky Horror-style lips!). VHS releases soon followed from Planet Video in 1982 and Continental Video in 1985, again using the Eerie title, which was also used for most of the later DVD and Blu-ray releases from companies like Code Red. It's also been issued on DVD under the title Enter the Devil, not to be confused with the *other* Enter the Devil released in 1972. UK release titles were The Devil Obsession and The Sexorcist.

★★

Il dolce corpo di Deborah (1968)

... aka: Body, The
... aka: El dulce cuerpo de Deborah
... aka: En röst i mörkret (A Voice in the Darkness)
... aka: Married to Kill
... aka: Sweet Body of Deborah, The

Directed by:
Romolo Guerrieri

Only very forgiving giallo addicts are going to want to swill this perfumed toilet water. Tranquilizer-popping, possibly unstable American Deborah (Carroll Baker) and her hunky new hubby Marcel (Jean Sorel) decide to take their honeymoon in Geneva, Switzerland so she can see where he grew up and learn as much about him as possible. Well, more like learn something about him as the two don't seem to know each other all that well. Everything is going fine (at least as far as sex and nice scenery are concerned) until they decide to go to a nightclub to watch a black dancer strip down to a g-string and Marcel runs into an old buddy of his. The friend, Philippe (Luigi Pistilli), glares at him, gives him the cold shoulder and turns right around and leaves as soon as her spots Marcel. Marcel chases him down only to have Philippe brand him a murderer; accusing him of killing his former girlfriend Suzanne prior to running off to the U.S. Philippe insinuates he murdered her, though the death is on the book as a suicide. Deborah overhears the entire conversation and, later on, presses Marcel to provide an explanation. That he does and a long flashback follows.

Prior to going to America, Marcel, who'd fallen on some hard times, fell in love with the well-to-do Suzanne Boileau (“Evelyn Stewart” / Ida Galli). Because some thugs he owed money to were beating him and threatening his life on a regular basis, Marcel had Suzanne swipe some money from her loaded parents to pay them off. Wanting to better himself (and pay them back), he then decided to go to America and stay with some friends in Boston until he could get back on his feet and provide better for their future. He promised Suzanne he'd write her every day and that he'd soon return to her, but that all changed once he met Deborah and fell in love with her. Supposedly the heartbroken Suzanne then committed suicide in his absence. Philippe is bitter because he was also in love with Suzanne and perhaps now wants revenge.

Now wanting to find out exactly what happened, Marcel goes to visit Suzanne's parents only to find the house has been abandoned long ago. When they go inside, they find a lit cigarette with lipstick on it and hear someone playing the piano but no one is to be found. A phone rings and the voice on the other end threatens Deborah; claiming they're going to kill her to punish Marcel for what he's done. A later call to the phone company reveals the phone at the villa was disconnected over a year ago. Never mind all of that, the lovey dovey duo have a plane to catch to Nice, France. Upon arrival, they rent a huge orange villa out in the country for a week and then many little things occur that give Marcel the impression that they didn't leave their troubles behind back in Geneva. Suzanne's favorite song ends up in their stack of records, Marcel thinks he sees Philippe at a boxing match and the strange phone calls begin again...

A lame and utterly forgettable thriller, Deborah is slow-moving, almost offensively empty and vapid and completely devoid of thrills and suspense. This has to be one of the weakest, most bland scripts ever penned by the prolific Ernesto Gastaldi. The dialogue is awful, the one-dimensional characters function as little more than mannequins to adorn with fine late 60s fashions and things plod along from one boring non-event to another until the very end when it unleashes a few customary "surprises." Sadly, the last minute plot twists are all incredibly lame and predictable (gee, a 300 thousand dollar life insurance policy... who'd have ever guessed!) and come way too late in the game to salvage this, anyway.

The only thrills this attempts to generate are of the erotic kind. However, since this was made during a big transitional period in world cinema when censorship was just starting to erode, the scenes are all extremely tame. We're talking close-up shots of arms, legs and shoulders and barely discernible “nude” scenes shot through foggy shower doors. In other words, there is no real nudity from the stars (at least not in the 92 minute version I viewed) despite about a half dozen “love” scenes. Instead, we get long sequences of the two leads kissing, hugging, lying in bed with strategically draped blankets wrapped around them and pawing at each other while spouting laughably insipid “romantic” dialogue (“You're so delicious... and I'm always so hungry.”) Often resembling a feature-length perfume commercial (perhaps a better alternate title would have been “Eau de Giallo”), the print ads pretty much sold the entire film on the (bare) backs of the hot lead couple. Alas, it takes more than a few pretty faces to make something worth watching.

I love Baker in certain roles (like her brilliant turn in Andy Warhol's Bad) but, let's face it, when the woman is bad, she is really bad. In the English version, the actress dubbed her own voice (I believe several of the other main actors did as well) and, despite being in her mid-30s when this was filmed, usually sounds like a frail old lady. Her voice cracks, warbles and completely lacks inflection and she often awkwardly breaks and pauses between words as if trying to sync her dub to her lips. She does however look great and some of her clothing choices are pretty hilarious. During one scene, she cuts it loose in a comic book-themed nightclub (“Kaboom!”) decked out in Christmas bulb earrings and bracelets. In another, she plays Twister on the front lawn while dressed in a lime green mesh onesie. Oh, the late 60s. Gotta love 'em.

Genre regular George Hilton is in this one, too, playing a voyeuristic painter named Robert. Born in Uruguay, the handsome Hilton started acting in Argentina but quickly relocated to Europe so that he could actually have a career. He was far better suited for the spaghetti westerns he was frequently cast in than suspense thrillers and horror, but found himself cast in numerous early 70s gialli anyway; usually ones also produced by Luciano Martino and directed by Luciano's brother Sergio Martino (who was one of the production managers on this one). In most of those films Hilton came off as incredibly bland and one-note, but he's a bit more animated and less wooden here despite the film itself being worse than his later efforts.

This French / Italian production was given a U.S. theatrical release in 1969 by Warner Brothers / Seven Arts but was never officially issued here on home video. Italy (on the Nocturno label), Greece (Key Video), Hungary (Mokep), Brazil (Mac) and Spain (CJ) all received VHS releases, while Italy, Sweden and Japan have gotten DVDs. The director was born under the name Romolo Girolami and is the brother of director Marino Girolami and uncle of director Enzo G. Castellari and actor Ennio Girolami. He also made the giallo The Double (1971) and a number of westerns.

★1/2