Il sesso del diavolo (1971)

... aka: Il sesso del diavolo: Trittico
... aka: Sex of the Devil
... aka: Triptych
... aka: Trittico

Directed by:
Oscar Brazzi

After taking a relaxing anniversary cruise, Andrea (Rossano Brazzi) and his wife Barbara (Maitena Galli) are dropped off in Istanbul, Turkey. There, they meet up with Andrea's reserved assistant Silvia (Sylva Koscina) and his Turkish colleague Omar (Fikret Hakan), who hasn't been back to his home country in fifteen years. Andrea's secretary has arranged a luxurious seafront villa for them to stay at while they're in the country. Upon arrival at their vacation home, Omar has an uncomfortable feeling of deja vu like he's been in the same house before while the married couple can't stop bickering.

Andrea was once a brilliant doctor but has since lost his skills, developed a phobia of surgical instruments and devolved into an impotent, depressed drunk. The much younger Barbara (because there's this rule that all doctor's wives in movies must be at least twenty years younger) was once a model in New York before settling down and isn't too comforting in his time of need. As a matter of fact, she doesn't at all mind rubbing his face in his failures, especially when she doesn't get her way. Andrea disapproves at how provocatively she dresses. She tells him he just doesn't get modern fashion cause he's so old. He's too tired to go out to the nightclubs their first day there. I'm sure you can already guess what her response is. Because of his depression, Andrea also hasn't been able to be intimate with his wife, something she just laughs about.

While tensions rise between the couple, there's a sinister housekeeper named Fatima (Güzin Özipek) quietly lurking about. Fatima gives Barbara a special medallion necklace. She then whips out a large tray decorated with astrological signs and arranges tea cups on it in a peculiar, purposeful way before serving it to the guests. Silvia has a wavy premonition that discourages her from actually drinking the tea but the other three do. The following day during a sightseeing trip, someone wearing sunglasses “accidentally” bumps into Andrea and almost knocks him over a cliff. Someone else has made a plaster sculpture and uses a brick to smash in the faces on it. A mysterious man stalks the ladies on a shopping and sightseeing excursion. A weird little neighbor girl keeps going to the garden at night “to see the lady.” But a blind palm reader has good news for Silvia at least. She's a butterfly who will soon be able to spread her wings and fly free and happy.

Recognizing some art pieces around the grounds of their villa, Omar finally realizes why the place feels so familiar. That's because it had belonged to a French sculptress friend of his named Claudine. Claudine was obsessed with the zodiac and what influence it has in our lives. Said beliefs also influenced her art pieces, which always had astral and psychic components. She also hung herself right outside that very home.

So the housekeeper hypnotizes Silvia and puts her through some ceremony where she's stripped and then dressed in a pink kaftan dress. She emerges from that sexier and more confident than the conservative Silvia who arrived in Istanbul, which results in her coming on to both the doctor and his wife. Omar, however, isn't having any of this, especially after having a terrifying vision of Claudine hanging in the garden. He buys a plane ticket to Ankara and encourages everyone else to head back to Rome. They eventually do but not after some other bizarre things occur.

The sunglasses assassin shows up a few more times to kill Mr. Obromov (Ayden Tezel), an art collector who's been buying up all of Claudine's work, and then tries to take out Andrea with a throwing dagger. There's a trippy belly-dancer act cut with the housekeeper's witchcraft ceremony, including one where she summons a scorpion and tries to get it to sting Andrea's crotch (!) The two female leads can't seem to keep their clothes on for longer than ten minutes and there are a few slow-motion dream sequences, including several of Andrea being chased around by the Turkish side characters and one where he and Silvia do the Eurotrash version of the beach scene in From Here to Eternity.

The director and two stars died decades ago so they ain't talkin' but I doubt even a zodiac-obsessed, acid-dropping former hippie astrologist could tell you what in the hell is going on here. This seems to be trying to say something about love, relationships and men being emasculated and ultimately rendered insignificant by independent women who'd just assume turn dyke than deal with male baggage, but when a filmmaker buries said message(s) under a bunch of artsy nonsense in an otherwise incomprehensible film he might as well not be saying anything at all. Not that this movie isn't somewhat interesting at times. It is. Some of the sequences are actually well done and kind of mesmerizing. Still, by the end, I found myself not really caring. And that's a good thing considering this doesn't even really have an ending; at least not one that actually resolves anything. Too much empty travelogue footage and mostly bland performances (Brazzi seems downright bored) don't help matters any and the score is as all over the place as the rest of the film, with a main theme by Stelvio Cipriani that blatantly rips off the opening chords of Iron Butterfly's “In a Gadda Da Vida!”

Never released here in America, this is listed most places online under the title Trittico ("Triptych"), which refers to one piece of art divided into three sections. I usually see it used to refer to three paintings from the same artist hung next to each other to create one continuous scene / image or one of those closed framed photos with two flaps that open to reveal a larger photo, but it can also refer to a trilogy of books or a musical composition in three parts. While this does feature a sculpture of three faces they show a couple of times, whatever relevance it has to the plot is, like everything else, muddled beyond comprehension.

The director is the younger brother of the star and was also a producer on Psychout for Murder (1969) and the sleazy Frankenstein's Castle of Freaks (1974), which also featured his brother. "Trittico” is merely a subtitle on the print I viewed and I found no poster with that title on it. Pretty much all advertising materials I've found call this Il sesso del diavolo or “Sex of the Devil” (not to be confused with Il sesso della strega or “Sex of the Witch” from around this same time), so that's what I'm calling it here.

★★

Duo bao long hu dou (1989)

... aka: Satanic Crystals

Directed by:
"Tommy Cheng” (Kei-Ying Cheng)

After spending the past two years in South Africa, Terry Chow (Kar-Yan Leung) returns to Hong Kong to find Susan aka The One Who Got Away (Gwai-Chi Daan) and hopefully convince her to return to Africa with him. Upon arrival, he stops by a bar to ask around about the potential whereabouts of his lost love and ends up beating up an angry pimp (Fui-On Shing) after he smacks around a hooker (Eliza Yue) and pummels two other guys. The grateful hooker then repays his gentlemanly gesture by letting him know where Susan is living during the following horribly-dubbed exchange: Hooker: “Tell me. Are you looking for Susan still?” / Mr. Chow: “Have you seen Susan?” / Hooker: “It was two years ago. Are you still looking for Susan now?” / Mr. Chow: "Mmm hmm."

Terry then goes to Susan's house and discovers she's since married John Chai (Richard Ng Man-Tat), who is both a deaf goofball and some kind of rich, powerful underworld figure protected by dozens of karate-fighting guards. Right in front of the oblivious husband, Terry convinces Susan to go back to Africa with him. While he's at the airport getting tickets, John's home is raided by Mr. Bates (Seung-Lam Wan) and his thugs. They kill all of the guards, strangle John to death, shoot Susan and steal a map that's supposed to lead to two multi-colored, glowing jade stones located in Thailand. Though they don't know it at the time, the group only find half the map leading to one of the stones before they split. When Terry returns, Susan (who manages to survive the shooting) tells him where the other half of the map leading to the location of the second stone is.

Terry organizes a group and heads over to Thailand. Immediately after they locate the stone in a cave, another criminal boss named Mr. Hu (played by the director) and his group show up and slaughter most of them. Terry is shot and wounded but manages to get away. A couple of hunters find Terry unconscious near a waterfall and take him back to their village where a doctor removes the bullet and he's nursed back to health. But one of the villagers runs off and rats him out to Mr. Hu. Hu and his men respond by massacring the entire village and stealing the second stone. Turns out they have an agreement with another village's chief to get the stones in exchange for an entire supply of opium. When Terry and one of the villagers return from a hunting trip they find everyone dead and vow to get revenge.

Meanwhile, Mr. Bates and his gang arrive from Hong Kong and try to come up with some agreement with Mr. Hu's group and the village chief. While that's going on, a vicious jungle tribe comprised almost entirely of women wearing matching vests, skirts and headbands is running around killing people with knives. It's at this point about 30 minutes in that I throw up my hands and mutter “What in the hell is even going on here?!"

Unfortunately, the utter confusion only worsens as Terry visits a strip club and tries to convince his American 'Nam vet bud (Christoph Kluppel) to help him. After he declines the offer, Terry shrugs and hooks up with a Thai hooker instead. He hops in a cab the next morning and the driver takes him to a remote village, where everyone tries to kill him and he manages to escape on a jet ski. And then we're introduced to a muscle-head American named Lucas (George Nicholas) who goes by the nickname Tiger, rapes then kidnaps a woman, also wants to get the stones and barely escapes in one piece after someone blows up his house. And then we meet a female arms dealer named Miss Chin who saves Terry and the war vet friend (who suddenly IS helping him minus any scene that establishes his change of heart) from another village out to get them. The men then must make their way through the harsh jungle where many are killed off by lions, snakes and alligators. Those pesky yet nimble tribeswomen (who are in cahoots with “Tiger”) eventually show up and start slashing everyone's throats. It's at this point I finally fall into passive viewer mode and stopped trying to even make sense of this plot.

Being filled with brainless action, gunfire, explosions, karate, blood and gore doesn't save this one from being insufferable. There are too many pointless subplots, too many bad guys, too many good guys, too many people you have no clue if they're good or bad, too many people set up as important who vanish and never return, too many extras running around getting shot and killed and such an utter disregard for coherent plotting and continuity one has no clue what's going on from one scene to the next. The frequent dark jungle /  cave settings and awful editing don't help matters and the people who English dubbed this clearly had no idea what was going on themselves. This may be even more senseless than those Godfrey Ho / Tomas Tang / Joseph Lai / IFD / Filmark epics. If you like those abominations perhaps you'll enjoy this one, too. Personally, movies like this just give me a headache.

And I still can't quite figure out why this is called Satanic Crystals. That's the only reason I watched this bloody thing in the first place! There's no Satanism and the “crystals” are never shown to have any special powers, though it's mentioned that they do. Saving this mess from my lowest possible rating is a triple-digit body count, some decent stunt work and amusing use made of a radio controlled helicopter at the very end. Both the Pan-Asia VHS and the Octopus laserdisc releases have English subtitles. This also received VHS and DVD releases in Germany on the Astro label.

★