Co-directed by Luigi Scattini and Mino Loy, both experts in the form, this is a well-made example of the early 1960s mondo that largely lacks sensationalism, shocks and supercilious cynicism.
The basic format is straightforward, with studio or nightclub set strip and dance routines alternating with documentary footage, primarily from Africa. The former sequences are largely self-explanatory and allowed to pass without comment; the latter usually accompanied by a purportedly informative voice-over / off.
The main points of note in the documentary material are some tribesmen cutting a calf’s throat and drinking its blood and another group performing female genital mutilation. Neither practice is shown in particularly graphic detail, especially compared to 1970s examples of the form, but presumably both, along with the obligatory shots of bare-breasted African women had the intended effect on audiences back in the day.
Much the same can probably be said for the nightclub routines, insofar as these feature some exposed European breasts with little or no pseudo-anthropological pretence.
The use – presumably unlicensed – of the James Bond theme in the closing routine, where the dancer is also often shown in silhouette, indirectly testifies to Dr No’s impact on the cultural consciousness of the time, to provide a point of comparison with the credits sequence and scoring of A Fistful of Dollars the following year.
Predictably the film’s politics, such as they are, are confused, with discussion of apartheid in South Africa countered by a great white hunter / Tarzan styled nightclub sequence.
What has to be remembered, however, is that a Jean Rouch was not exactly the model for the film which, taken in its own terms, presumably met its vernacular audience’s needs.
Showing posts with label Luigi Scattini. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Luigi Scattini. Show all posts
Sunday, 10 May 2009
Thursday, 13 November 2008
Blue Nude
Rocco is an aspiring Italian-born actor and screenwriter, resident in New York, who in the meantime performs whatever hustles he needs to to get by, ranging from stripping to acting in porn films and as an escort, and endeavours to extricate himself from the various tricky situations these tend to get him into with gangster lowlife types.
Though not framed as a mondo, with the only voice-off we hear a vaguely Taxi Driver style one of Rocco's working in his room on the screenplay in which he is the main character, the film actually ends up capturing more of a particular time, place and world than many a comparable documentary might through the presence of several actual porn performers of the time including Wade Nichols, Carter Stevens and Susan McBain; a roughie shoot that results in an accidental piece of quasi-snuff, and lots of actuality shots of 42nd Street type locations. (I say quasi-snuff because, to their credit, the filmmakers avoids the more obvious and sensationalist scenario of a film being made with the intention of murdering its female performer at the climax.)
Another reference point is Sylvester Stallone, a poster of whom as Rocky adorns Rocco's wall, encourgaging us to think of the actor's parallel struggles to bring Rocky to the screen and not so hidden porn past with The Party and Kitty and Stud's / The Italian Stallion.
If Taxi Driver is a film about the relationship between film and real life, Travis Bickle taking inspiration from the heroes of the western film and trying to apply their mythic solutions to the real-world situation of New York circa 1976 with decidedly ironic results, Blue Nude performs a similar function for the relationship between Italian-American actors and filmmakers of the period such as Stallone, De Niro and Scorsese and its own Italian protagononist.
Rocco's voice-off as he works on the screenplay in which he is the protagonist echoes Bickle's reading / writing of his diary serves to suggest that, whilst certainly possessing more self-awareness than Bickle and a fundamentally different attitude of being able to adapt to circumstances, also fails to adequately recognise the difference between his situation as an Italian immigrant and those of his Italian-American models.
A telling exception is Rudolf Valentino, though Rocco's need to identify who Valentino is to his new girlfriend signals that there is a problem here as well. Valentino and the Latin Lover type he represented were, after all, figures from half a century ago. Yet the myth of the American Dream, as promulgated by Hollywood, has endured. (In that it was inspired by the real life case of Chuck Wepner, the almost unknown boxer who went the distance with Muhammad Ali, Rocky provides a partial exception to this rule.)
One difficulty in making sense of all this is that the dubbing of the film into Italian makes it harder to ascertain how far Rocco is actually out of place. We don't know if he is thinking and writing in English rather than Italian, or if his screenplay suffers from translations of the “hill of boots” variety, although a reference to linguistic misunderstanding in the dialogue does sees Rocco correct a fellow immigrant on the distinction between Scorsese and Scozzese.
Rocco's misunderstandings perhaps thus appear more in terms of attitudes and his awareness of the porn demi-monde in particular, as when he wonders about the mixture of milk, whisky and honey he and the other male performer are served – apparently the 1970s equivalent of viagra – and later attacks his colleague, failing to recognise that the man and his new girlfriend are only acting when declaring their affections for one another in the course of the shooting of another film.
Renato Romano / Raf Valenti is credited as executive producer and Giacomo Rossi Stuart as assistant director besides their acting roles.
A sense of continuity with director Luigi Scattini's earlier mondo films is provided by Piero Umiliani's music, with snippets of score (and dialogue) from Sweden Heaven and Hell audible on the audio track. The main theme here, with acoustic guitar, electric piano and commentative lyrics about New York, rather than vocalism and organ, is quite different from most of the composer's other work for Scattini.
Though not framed as a mondo, with the only voice-off we hear a vaguely Taxi Driver style one of Rocco's working in his room on the screenplay in which he is the main character, the film actually ends up capturing more of a particular time, place and world than many a comparable documentary might through the presence of several actual porn performers of the time including Wade Nichols, Carter Stevens and Susan McBain; a roughie shoot that results in an accidental piece of quasi-snuff, and lots of actuality shots of 42nd Street type locations. (I say quasi-snuff because, to their credit, the filmmakers avoids the more obvious and sensationalist scenario of a film being made with the intention of murdering its female performer at the climax.)
Another reference point is Sylvester Stallone, a poster of whom as Rocky adorns Rocco's wall, encourgaging us to think of the actor's parallel struggles to bring Rocky to the screen and not so hidden porn past with The Party and Kitty and Stud's / The Italian Stallion.
If Taxi Driver is a film about the relationship between film and real life, Travis Bickle taking inspiration from the heroes of the western film and trying to apply their mythic solutions to the real-world situation of New York circa 1976 with decidedly ironic results, Blue Nude performs a similar function for the relationship between Italian-American actors and filmmakers of the period such as Stallone, De Niro and Scorsese and its own Italian protagononist.
Rocco's voice-off as he works on the screenplay in which he is the protagonist echoes Bickle's reading / writing of his diary serves to suggest that, whilst certainly possessing more self-awareness than Bickle and a fundamentally different attitude of being able to adapt to circumstances, also fails to adequately recognise the difference between his situation as an Italian immigrant and those of his Italian-American models.
A telling exception is Rudolf Valentino, though Rocco's need to identify who Valentino is to his new girlfriend signals that there is a problem here as well. Valentino and the Latin Lover type he represented were, after all, figures from half a century ago. Yet the myth of the American Dream, as promulgated by Hollywood, has endured. (In that it was inspired by the real life case of Chuck Wepner, the almost unknown boxer who went the distance with Muhammad Ali, Rocky provides a partial exception to this rule.)
One difficulty in making sense of all this is that the dubbing of the film into Italian makes it harder to ascertain how far Rocco is actually out of place. We don't know if he is thinking and writing in English rather than Italian, or if his screenplay suffers from translations of the “hill of boots” variety, although a reference to linguistic misunderstanding in the dialogue does sees Rocco correct a fellow immigrant on the distinction between Scorsese and Scozzese.
Rocco's misunderstandings perhaps thus appear more in terms of attitudes and his awareness of the porn demi-monde in particular, as when he wonders about the mixture of milk, whisky and honey he and the other male performer are served – apparently the 1970s equivalent of viagra – and later attacks his colleague, failing to recognise that the man and his new girlfriend are only acting when declaring their affections for one another in the course of the shooting of another film.
Renato Romano / Raf Valenti is credited as executive producer and Giacomo Rossi Stuart as assistant director besides their acting roles.
A sense of continuity with director Luigi Scattini's earlier mondo films is provided by Piero Umiliani's music, with snippets of score (and dialogue) from Sweden Heaven and Hell audible on the audio track. The main theme here, with acoustic guitar, electric piano and commentative lyrics about New York, rather than vocalism and organ, is quite different from most of the composer's other work for Scattini.
Monday, 1 September 2008
Svezia, inferno e paradiso / Sweden Heaven and Hell
This 1969 mondo is mainly known for one thing: it is the film which gave the world The Muppet Show theme, manha manha. It was written by Piero Umiliani, writer-director Luigi Scattini's composer of choice.
The film itself is very much business as usual, presenting the usual mixture of the defamiliarised, like the state-run alcohol shop, and the downright strange, like the team of the blind divers who salvage things from Stockholm harbour, accompanied by an intermittently informative but mostly sceptical, supercilious and non-sequitur voice-off:
“Sweden covers little more than a quarter million sqaure miles of Europe. Its population is eight million, which means statistically around thirty four and one-quarter inhabitants to every square mile. The quarter inhabitant is an infant. At sixteen he or she acquires the status of a half and at twenty graduates to a whole.”
The titles and customary statement of fact with slow-motion spacehopper action
The specific theme or question tying all the vignettes, which also include the likes of sex education classes, sex shops, swingers' and lesbian clubs, together is that of the title: does the Swedish model society of the time represents more a heaven or a hell on earth?
The answer, unsurprisingly, is a balance of both. Thus, for example, the selling of alcohol through the Systembolaget apparently meant that the authorities avoid supplying registered alcoholics, who would then purchase their booze from other customers allowed to use the store. Others, presumably no longer able to afford the marked-up prices are seen inhaling from petrol soaked rags and eating shoe polish on bread to get a hit. Or, to recast things in sociological terms, it's about the unanticipated consequences of a essentially well-intentioned but at times paternalistic social-democratic welfare state.
Shoe-polish on bread. Mmm
The balance also presumably depends on where and when you were viewing the film, your own social values and – one suspects, having only seen the film in English – the particular slant given the material by the voice-off, Edmond Purdom supplying the English narration and Enrico Maria Salerno the Italian.
For the contemporary viewer at nearly 40 years distance of the material comes across as dated rather than shocking, providing a point of contrast with the harder edged strain of mondo typified by the slaughterfest likes of Africa Addio.
Indeed, the biggest shock may be in the attitudes espoused by the voice-over, with its indiscriminate 'drugs are bad' lumping together of hash and heroin and 'women become lesbians because they've been raped or otherwise actively turned off men, whom they should naturally desire' discourses.
The 'desperate', 'unhappy' 'lesbians'
Another criticism is one endemic to the mondo as a whole, that too often we're shown five minutes of things that that could in themselves have made 'proper' 50 minute documentaries, such as the aforementioned blind divers (what it is it like to experience the world as they do?) or the centre for troubled children (what does the existence of a 12-year-old prostitute say about the failings of the system?)
A cold war era nuclear bunker of a type that may unfortunately be coming back into fashion; note the vehicle at the bottom of the image providing for the rapid tracking style shot
Beyond this the apparent banning of the film in Sweden itself because some material was collected covertly without the informed consent of those caught on camera is also of interest when considering the mondo filone with their tendency to exploit the third world more than the first, whilst also providing another indicator of the strength of the Swedish social democractic idea(l) in its defence of the otherwise relatively powerless. It also provides an intriguing point of connection to Fredrick Wiseman's Titicut Follies, as a 'legitimate' documentary that suffered comparable legal challenges.
By turns intentionally and unintentionally funny, sad, touching and surreal – the opening credits sequence, of identically clad girls on grinning faced orange spacehoppers bouncing in slow motion – Sweden Heaven and Hell remains sufficiently entertaining, for the right and wrong reasons, to be worth a look, while again giving plenty to think about.
[Tim Lucas' s Video Watchblog post on the film: http://videowatchdog.blogspot.com/2008/06/cincinnati-heaven-and-hell.html]
The film itself is very much business as usual, presenting the usual mixture of the defamiliarised, like the state-run alcohol shop, and the downright strange, like the team of the blind divers who salvage things from Stockholm harbour, accompanied by an intermittently informative but mostly sceptical, supercilious and non-sequitur voice-off:
“Sweden covers little more than a quarter million sqaure miles of Europe. Its population is eight million, which means statistically around thirty four and one-quarter inhabitants to every square mile. The quarter inhabitant is an infant. At sixteen he or she acquires the status of a half and at twenty graduates to a whole.”
The titles and customary statement of fact with slow-motion spacehopper action
The specific theme or question tying all the vignettes, which also include the likes of sex education classes, sex shops, swingers' and lesbian clubs, together is that of the title: does the Swedish model society of the time represents more a heaven or a hell on earth?
The answer, unsurprisingly, is a balance of both. Thus, for example, the selling of alcohol through the Systembolaget apparently meant that the authorities avoid supplying registered alcoholics, who would then purchase their booze from other customers allowed to use the store. Others, presumably no longer able to afford the marked-up prices are seen inhaling from petrol soaked rags and eating shoe polish on bread to get a hit. Or, to recast things in sociological terms, it's about the unanticipated consequences of a essentially well-intentioned but at times paternalistic social-democratic welfare state.
Shoe-polish on bread. Mmm
The balance also presumably depends on where and when you were viewing the film, your own social values and – one suspects, having only seen the film in English – the particular slant given the material by the voice-off, Edmond Purdom supplying the English narration and Enrico Maria Salerno the Italian.
For the contemporary viewer at nearly 40 years distance of the material comes across as dated rather than shocking, providing a point of contrast with the harder edged strain of mondo typified by the slaughterfest likes of Africa Addio.
Indeed, the biggest shock may be in the attitudes espoused by the voice-over, with its indiscriminate 'drugs are bad' lumping together of hash and heroin and 'women become lesbians because they've been raped or otherwise actively turned off men, whom they should naturally desire' discourses.
The 'desperate', 'unhappy' 'lesbians'
Another criticism is one endemic to the mondo as a whole, that too often we're shown five minutes of things that that could in themselves have made 'proper' 50 minute documentaries, such as the aforementioned blind divers (what it is it like to experience the world as they do?) or the centre for troubled children (what does the existence of a 12-year-old prostitute say about the failings of the system?)
A cold war era nuclear bunker of a type that may unfortunately be coming back into fashion; note the vehicle at the bottom of the image providing for the rapid tracking style shot
Beyond this the apparent banning of the film in Sweden itself because some material was collected covertly without the informed consent of those caught on camera is also of interest when considering the mondo filone with their tendency to exploit the third world more than the first, whilst also providing another indicator of the strength of the Swedish social democractic idea(l) in its defence of the otherwise relatively powerless. It also provides an intriguing point of connection to Fredrick Wiseman's Titicut Follies, as a 'legitimate' documentary that suffered comparable legal challenges.
By turns intentionally and unintentionally funny, sad, touching and surreal – the opening credits sequence, of identically clad girls on grinning faced orange spacehoppers bouncing in slow motion – Sweden Heaven and Hell remains sufficiently entertaining, for the right and wrong reasons, to be worth a look, while again giving plenty to think about.
[Tim Lucas' s Video Watchblog post on the film: http://videowatchdog.blogspot.com/2008/06/cincinnati-heaven-and-hell.html]
Thursday, 21 August 2008
Sunday, 10 August 2008
Il Corpo / The Body
The presence of Carroll Baker in this 1975 film from Luigi Scattini neatly makes its claims to be a giallo that bit clearer. For, if featuring no black gloved killers nor traumatic incidents in a characters past now erupting into the present, it does include a noir style conspiracy in which the participants are motivated by passion and / or prospective financial advantage.
But unlike the various films she made with Umberto Lenzi a few years earlier, Baker is here cast in a supporting role rather than as a conspirator or victim, with the majority of the drama instead revolving around the triangle of Enrico Maria Salerno, Zeudi Araya and Leonard Mann.
Salerno plays Antoine, a New York cabbie who won the lottery and left the rat race behind to go live in the tropical paradise of Trinidad.
That, at least, was the theory.
The practice has thus far proven somewhat different, entailing little more than a change of scenery, more mosquitoes, and a shift from driving a cab to piloting a boat.
Indeed, given that the story actually starts with two locals attacking Antoine because he apparently owes them money it's possible that his life could even be considered to have gotten worse, were it not for one major compensation.
Antoine and Alan
That is Araya. She plays Princess, a beautiful islander who serves as Antoine's lover and housekeeper.
Mann plays Alan, the drifter who rescues Antoine. With Alan soon proving as handy with boats as with his fists, Antoine offers him work and a place to stay.
Images of the characters behind symbolic bars recur throughout the film to convey their senses of entrapment
Though Princess initially gives Alan a frosty reception, this facade soon melts as they spend some time together away from Antoine's watchful eye.
Princess tries on the yellow rather than black dress as she prepares to make her move
Then, however, Princess turns cold again, although this only proves to be a test of Alan's commitment to their relationship and how far he is willing to go to be with her:
“Alan, do you really love me?”
“You know I love you.”
“Do you really love me very much? Do you love me enough to do anything at all for me?”
“Yes”
“Then, darling, I want you to kill him.”
But, as with Ossessione – a possible model given its own noir origins, comparable triangle of two men and one woman, and oppressive setting that the woman wants to get away from – the question is first whether words are one thing and deeds another and then, once the deed is done, whether the conspirators will get away with it...
Scattini's direction is simple but effective, juxtaposing a direct handheld camera style that gives a raw documentary feel with more carefully composed touristic imagery and some generally judicously used shock zooms.
The performances from Baker, Salerno and Mann are pleasing, benefitting from their willingness to engage with their characters, warts and all.
Unusually Antoine drinks rum rather than J&B whisky
One moment that particularly stands out in this regard is the first encounter between Baker and Salerno, in which we also learn of their past history together:
Madeleine's latest love has left her, as Antoine foretold he would. Having hit the bottle hard she is torn between being her desire not to be seen by her former husband in such a dissolute state and her momentary craving for his attention and affection, as those selfsame things that he is unable and unwilling to give.
The deglamourised Baker
If this scene would pose no threat to Baker in the context of a stage production of some respectable play about a middle-aged, alcoholic racist, commutated to the screen in the form of a popular film it carried more of a risk of typecasting for the 40-something star, as someone only suitable for portraying faded and tarnished glamour. (“You don't want that black bitch. Don't you understand – you don't own her, you're the slave, the slave of a black body!”)
As The Body of the title, Araya's role necessarily provides less to work with. Though perhaps not managing to transcend its limitations, her performance is nevertheless credible and belies her history as a beauty queen and model in a way that makes it clear Scattini was justified in casting her in a number of his films. (It also left me wondering what she might have brought to the Black Emanuelle franchise, in that disregarding Laura Gemser's beauty the Dutch-Indonesian actress does tend towards a certain inexpressiveness that sometimes detracts when her character presents the same blasé indifference to each and every encounter, no matter how outre.)
The body – Araya displaying her charms
Not Tinti and Gemser, but Mann and Araya
Scattini, Massimo Felisatti and Fabio Pittorru's writing is also better than average. Though they throw a number of twists into the tale, some of which are also pleasingly ironic, there is nothing that emerges as contrived either whilst watching the story unfold or reconstructing it retrospectively.
Instead, seemingly incidental aspects come to attain a greater significance. Note, for example, Antoine's drunken remarks to Alan that drifters and thieves are one and the same after they have failed to catch some apparent intruders one night, as an indication of suspicions of his new friend and that he's more on the ball than his habitually dishevelled, drunken state suggests. Or note Princess's request that Antoine get her a pair of shoes when he is in town, having hitherto declined to wear them.
Piero Umiliani contributes a beautifully evocative score that is by turns soothing, melancholy, romantic and impassioned, with Hammond organ grooves, lush vocalism and all the his trademark ingredients present; more generally, looking at the list of Umiliani and Scattini's collaborations, it's clear that they were very much in tune with one another, resulting in a series of scores that work beyond the images they support and which, like the film, can be enthusiastically recommended to those willing to go beyond the more familiar Argento / Martino / Morricone / Nicolai giallo idioms of the time.
[I watched the film through an English dubbed AVI from Cinemageddon]
But unlike the various films she made with Umberto Lenzi a few years earlier, Baker is here cast in a supporting role rather than as a conspirator or victim, with the majority of the drama instead revolving around the triangle of Enrico Maria Salerno, Zeudi Araya and Leonard Mann.
Salerno plays Antoine, a New York cabbie who won the lottery and left the rat race behind to go live in the tropical paradise of Trinidad.
That, at least, was the theory.
The practice has thus far proven somewhat different, entailing little more than a change of scenery, more mosquitoes, and a shift from driving a cab to piloting a boat.
Indeed, given that the story actually starts with two locals attacking Antoine because he apparently owes them money it's possible that his life could even be considered to have gotten worse, were it not for one major compensation.
Antoine and Alan
That is Araya. She plays Princess, a beautiful islander who serves as Antoine's lover and housekeeper.
Mann plays Alan, the drifter who rescues Antoine. With Alan soon proving as handy with boats as with his fists, Antoine offers him work and a place to stay.
Images of the characters behind symbolic bars recur throughout the film to convey their senses of entrapment
Though Princess initially gives Alan a frosty reception, this facade soon melts as they spend some time together away from Antoine's watchful eye.
Princess tries on the yellow rather than black dress as she prepares to make her move
Then, however, Princess turns cold again, although this only proves to be a test of Alan's commitment to their relationship and how far he is willing to go to be with her:
“Alan, do you really love me?”
“You know I love you.”
“Do you really love me very much? Do you love me enough to do anything at all for me?”
“Yes”
“Then, darling, I want you to kill him.”
But, as with Ossessione – a possible model given its own noir origins, comparable triangle of two men and one woman, and oppressive setting that the woman wants to get away from – the question is first whether words are one thing and deeds another and then, once the deed is done, whether the conspirators will get away with it...
Scattini's direction is simple but effective, juxtaposing a direct handheld camera style that gives a raw documentary feel with more carefully composed touristic imagery and some generally judicously used shock zooms.
The performances from Baker, Salerno and Mann are pleasing, benefitting from their willingness to engage with their characters, warts and all.
Unusually Antoine drinks rum rather than J&B whisky
One moment that particularly stands out in this regard is the first encounter between Baker and Salerno, in which we also learn of their past history together:
Madeleine's latest love has left her, as Antoine foretold he would. Having hit the bottle hard she is torn between being her desire not to be seen by her former husband in such a dissolute state and her momentary craving for his attention and affection, as those selfsame things that he is unable and unwilling to give.
The deglamourised Baker
If this scene would pose no threat to Baker in the context of a stage production of some respectable play about a middle-aged, alcoholic racist, commutated to the screen in the form of a popular film it carried more of a risk of typecasting for the 40-something star, as someone only suitable for portraying faded and tarnished glamour. (“You don't want that black bitch. Don't you understand – you don't own her, you're the slave, the slave of a black body!”)
As The Body of the title, Araya's role necessarily provides less to work with. Though perhaps not managing to transcend its limitations, her performance is nevertheless credible and belies her history as a beauty queen and model in a way that makes it clear Scattini was justified in casting her in a number of his films. (It also left me wondering what she might have brought to the Black Emanuelle franchise, in that disregarding Laura Gemser's beauty the Dutch-Indonesian actress does tend towards a certain inexpressiveness that sometimes detracts when her character presents the same blasé indifference to each and every encounter, no matter how outre.)
The body – Araya displaying her charms
Not Tinti and Gemser, but Mann and Araya
Scattini, Massimo Felisatti and Fabio Pittorru's writing is also better than average. Though they throw a number of twists into the tale, some of which are also pleasingly ironic, there is nothing that emerges as contrived either whilst watching the story unfold or reconstructing it retrospectively.
Instead, seemingly incidental aspects come to attain a greater significance. Note, for example, Antoine's drunken remarks to Alan that drifters and thieves are one and the same after they have failed to catch some apparent intruders one night, as an indication of suspicions of his new friend and that he's more on the ball than his habitually dishevelled, drunken state suggests. Or note Princess's request that Antoine get her a pair of shoes when he is in town, having hitherto declined to wear them.
Piero Umiliani contributes a beautifully evocative score that is by turns soothing, melancholy, romantic and impassioned, with Hammond organ grooves, lush vocalism and all the his trademark ingredients present; more generally, looking at the list of Umiliani and Scattini's collaborations, it's clear that they were very much in tune with one another, resulting in a series of scores that work beyond the images they support and which, like the film, can be enthusiastically recommended to those willing to go beyond the more familiar Argento / Martino / Morricone / Nicolai giallo idioms of the time.
[I watched the film through an English dubbed AVI from Cinemageddon]
Wednesday, 4 June 2008
Angeli bianchi... angeli neri / White Angel... Black Angel / The Satanists / Witchcraft 70
This is one of a number of mondo films made by Luigi Scattini, along with Sexy magico, L' Amore primitivo, Sweden: Heaven or Hell and Questo sporco mondo meraviglioso.
Presenting the usual combination of documentary footage and reconstructions of dubious provenance and authenticity accompanied by a supercilious voice-over commentary (courtesy of Edmund Purdom, who performed similar chores on Sweden: Heaven or Hell) there's not much to be said about the film except it is impossible to take seriously yet sometimes places barriers to enjoyment at the camp level through the obligatory animal killing footage, including that of a hen and a goat in the context of a Brazilian magic ceremony where the initiate has her freshly shaven head doused in their blood and daubed with feathers.
With most of the participants in the black magic scenes either the kind that you wouldn't particularly want to see naked anyway or those that you wouldn't mind but who seem to always keep themselves strategically covered, the film's saving grace is Piero Umiliani's soundtrack.
Umiliani worked with Scattini regularly and produced some of his best and best known work, if we consider that The Muppet Show's mahna mahna theme originated in Sweden: Heaven and Hell for him, with Witchcraft 70 offering a pleasing mix of easy listening, bossa, samba and psychedelia-tinged cues that also showcase the talents of Edda Dell Orso, Nora Orlandi, I Cantori moderni and Lydia MacDonald amongst others.
Fans of Anton Lavey may also be interested to know that the brilliantly self-publicising ex-carny man and his The Church of Satan are included in one of the segments, though little insight into his philosophy is provided.
Presenting the usual combination of documentary footage and reconstructions of dubious provenance and authenticity accompanied by a supercilious voice-over commentary (courtesy of Edmund Purdom, who performed similar chores on Sweden: Heaven or Hell) there's not much to be said about the film except it is impossible to take seriously yet sometimes places barriers to enjoyment at the camp level through the obligatory animal killing footage, including that of a hen and a goat in the context of a Brazilian magic ceremony where the initiate has her freshly shaven head doused in their blood and daubed with feathers.
With most of the participants in the black magic scenes either the kind that you wouldn't particularly want to see naked anyway or those that you wouldn't mind but who seem to always keep themselves strategically covered, the film's saving grace is Piero Umiliani's soundtrack.
Umiliani worked with Scattini regularly and produced some of his best and best known work, if we consider that The Muppet Show's mahna mahna theme originated in Sweden: Heaven and Hell for him, with Witchcraft 70 offering a pleasing mix of easy listening, bossa, samba and psychedelia-tinged cues that also showcase the talents of Edda Dell Orso, Nora Orlandi, I Cantori moderni and Lydia MacDonald amongst others.
Fans of Anton Lavey may also be interested to know that the brilliantly self-publicising ex-carny man and his The Church of Satan are included in one of the segments, though little insight into his philosophy is provided.
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