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

Invitation to Hell (1982)

Directed by:

Michael J. Murphy

College student Jacky (Becky Simpson) receives an invitation to a party taking place at a remote farmhouse owned by her estranged friend Laura (Catherine Rowlands), who had been "seduced away" from her studies to live out in the sticks with her new husband, Ed (Joseph Sheahan). Upon arrival, Jacky discovers the little get-together is actually a costume party but she's brought nothing to wear. Luckily her friend happens to have a Bride of Frankenstein costume sitting around. The masked party guests grab torches and head outside to some pagan altar. A confused and terrified Jacky is then grabbed and given an injection of a "sedative" against her wishes. She promptly passes out.

Jacky doesn't awaken until late the next day. After finding mysterious scratches on the inside of her thigh, she grabs her suitcase and rushes for the door. However, she's stopped by Ed and Laura, who warn her not to leave, tell her they're powerless to do anything about what's about to happen and keep speaking in extremely vague terms about a "he" and a "him" without actually identifying anyone. Jacky's attempt to drive off fails when her car mysteriously dies. And then her college boyfriend, Rick (Russell Hall), who was supposed to be back at school studying, turns up and makes no bones about also being involved in luring her there and whatever else happens to be going on.

Our utterly confused heroine in taken back inside and understandably locks herself up in a bedroom, while everyone else there continues to behave strangely. A guilt-stricken Laura eventually decides to confide in Jacky that they have somehow disturbed an ancient evil presence there that's growing stronger by the day but otherwise doesn't fully elaborate. Aside from the couple, there's also a slutty / bitchy ("I don't dislike you but I'm trying to pretend you don't exist.") maid named Liz (Tina Barnett) and a couple of young farmhands; Alan (Steven Longhurst) and the mute Maurice (Colin Efford), who sleep in the same bedroom and have nude magazine layouts taped to their walls. The former is a drunk who sometimes speaks in a demon voice while the latter is a young muscular stud who constantly lifts weights and is also sometimes possessed with glowing red eyes. Supposedly, whatever it is haunting the land has chosen to mostly use him as a host body due to his strength.

Jacky discovers that she's been brought there because she's a virgin and is wanted by the demon to "propagate his kind in flesh and blood" during the spring equinox. A series of murders soon follow. Someone's impaled with a pitchfork, raised off the ground and then thrown into a lake. A head gets crushed, a neck is snapped and, during the bloodiest bit, a man is stabbed through the throat, crucified and has his heart ripped out. Poor Jacky isn't even able to lose her virginity because her boyfriend gets a knife stuck through his throat before he can even get his pants off. A body thrown into a fire ends up spawning a red-eyed hooded demon.

Aren't rural farms one of the best horror movie settings? For starters, they're out in the middle of nowhere. Then you've got barns and other buildings away from the main home where people can get killed and bodies can be hidden. They're usually surrounded by woods, so you've also got that. And there are always all manner of sharp weapons just lying around and readily available. While this makes some good use of all of that, no time at all is wasted throwing us right into the story and the film is has some pretty entertaining bits, you have to look past truly shoddy technical credits to get to the good stuff. The photography is flat, the sound recording and editing are both awful, the story is muddled, the acting (while not the worst I've ever seen) is mostly amateurish and the film somehow manages to drag toward the end despite the 43-minute run time, which is pretty inexcusable.

While I'm just starting to scratch the surface with Murphy's films, I'm already picking up some major DeCoteau-style homoerotic vibes. While the leading lady is briefly seen topless, much more time is spent lingering on the male cast members. In fact, the hunky mute guy is showcased more in various stages of undress, and the recipient of far more exploitative camera shots (consult screen caps), than any of the women. During nearly all of his scenes, he's shown is skin tight clothing, shirtless or changing clothes and even has his shirt ripped off the one time he happens to be wearing one. The camera pans up and down his body and countless shots are specifically cropped just to show off his chest and arms. I've watched four movies from this guy so far and three of them feature long montages of sweaty guys working out, including this one. We shall see if this particular theme continues on in his later work. I have a sneaking suspicion it will.

Unlike many of the director's other films, this received a VHS release in a number of countries, including the U.S. (on the Mega [a division of Mogul] label), Canada (Videoline Productions) and the UK (Scorpio Video). There was also a 2008 DVD release (limited to 1000 copies and featuring a commentary track from the director) through Sarcophilous Films, who've paired it with Murphy's theater slasher The Last Night (1983). This may explain why it's one of only two Murphy films with over 100 votes on IMDb, though seeing how it also shares its title with a Wes Craven-directed TV movie released two years later, confusion may also have something to do with that.

★★