Sfida al diavolo / Challenge the Devil / Katarsis

One of the things about watching lots of Italian genre films from the late 50s through 80s is that you get used to certain names cropping up, like wig makers Rocchetti and Carboni or CSC graduate Carla Mancini.

This, by contrast, is one of those films where most of the names in the credits don’t mean much – including director Guiseppe Veggezzi / Joseph Vegh whose sole IMDB credit this is.

The two important names in the cast are Christopher Lee and Giorgio Ardisson, the former spelled as Cristopher in the credits and the latter’s forename Anglicised to George.

The film opens at an airport and looks like it’s going to be a crime thriller as two hitmen prepare to go into action against Carlo, for his refusal to hand over some documents.

Although wounded, Carlo escapes – it isn’t completely clear how – to a monastery where he asks to see one of the order, Pejo, an old friend. Carlo explains he hasn’t got the documents because Alma took them.

We then cut to a nightclub and are presented with a succession of song and dance numbers. Their relationship to the previous scenes only becomes evident when Pejo goes to visit Alma, a dancer at the club, backstage. Alma is reluctant to give up the documents – at least not for a considerable sum of money.

Pejo then recounts the story of how he became a monk – we’re now 20 minutes into the 75 minute film – and we segue into an extended flashback.

He and the rest of the gang – including the particularly out of control Ugo, played by Ardisson – were out looking for kicks, entailing forcing other cars off the road and then beating the occupant of one such vehicle after he has crashed.

Continuing on, the gang leave the road and, as night falls, end up at an old and apparently uninhabited castle. They decide to break in and explore the place, soon finding a banquet table laid out with food and drink which, needless to say, they gorge themselves on, before having a remarkably chaste “orgy” entailing dancing around and playing bongos for several minutes.

At this point Lee makes his appearance as the old man of the house and talks about his dead beloved and sold his soul to the Devil in order to bring her back. He hears her voice, but can never find her, and thus offers the gang all the riches in the castle if they can find her for him. After they have gone, the clock chimes midnight and the man is either replaced by or transforms into the Devil himself.

Round about this point the gang, who have gone in search of the treasure, start to feel a little less brave, and we get some reasonably decent Gothic/Fantastique atmospheres along with the woman making her appearance, leading the gang onto a seemingly endless spiral staircase ending in a crystal/mirror image filled room, traps each of them such that they can see the others but not reach or touch them.

The existential dread of the scene is effectively conveyed, recalling the likes of Sam Dalmas’s entrapment in the gallery sequence of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage; the infinite plane that Liza and John find themselves in at the end of The Beyond; Eswai’s pursuit of himself in Kill Baby Kill and – perhaps ultimately most revealing – the doubled characters in Nude for Satan.

Having been trapped for a while and now on their last legs, the gang follow one of the spiders inhabiting the place to find an equally long descending staircase that in turn leads onto a long passage. They have only just entered it, however, when they fall into a pit and encounter the Devil and/or the old man again. Suitably chastened and transformed by their experiences, they flee the castle.

At this point we cut back to the framing narrative as Pejo provides the moral of the story before, back in the past, the lady of the castle appears to them once more, coming out of a clock in a somewhat Rollin-esque manner.



At this point we cut back to the framing narrative as Pejo provides the moral of the story before, back in the past, the lady of the castle appears to them once more, coming out of a clock in a somewhat Rollin-esque manner. They take her out of the castle, into the light, and give her a proper burial. Significantly here we’re given a semi-subjective shot from inside the grave, looking up to the heavens.



As the contrite gang members pass the man they had earlier beaten, they tend to his injuries. “Strangely, his face resembled the old man from the castle.”

Alma, reduced to tears by Pejo’s tale, gives him the documents; that her name means soul hardly seems coincidental insofar as she too has been saved.

While this can in no way be considered a good film, it is certainly an interesting one for its combination of the inept and the poetic, or that “sublime” which Ado Kyrou famously identified as a reason for watching bad films.

Thanks must again go out to the badfilm community for recording this obscurity off Italian TV;  converting it to an AVI and torrent, and providing fansubs.

I Lunghi cappelli della morte / The Long Hair of Death

Though the title might suggest a contemporary J-horror, The Long Hair of Death is, of course, a 1960s Italian Gothic. Whilst one of the less well known examples of the form, it serves as an ideal introduction to it through the dense network of intertextual references in Ernesto Gastaldi's script and the iconic presence of Barbara Steele.

Set in the 14th century we open with the impending execution of suspected witch, Adele Karnstein, for the sorcerous murder of the local lord, Franz Humbold. It's the usual damned either way trial by ordeal scenario, whereby death will provide absolution. (“Adele Karnstein the hour has arrived. The lord will save you if you are innocent. Be strong and have faith.”)


An almost unrecognisable Umberto Raho as the local witch-finder, here beautifully isolated by the all-encompassing blackness.

Desperately seeking a stay of execution, Adele's elder daughter Helene (Steele) pleads with the new lord, Franz's brother (Giuliano Raffaeli), for a stay of execution. She has evidence that the killer is one of the Count's own household.

Taking advantage of the situation, the Count demands that Helene first submit to his carnal desires. (“What can a man ask of a beautiful woman like you? There is only one thing that I want.”) She does. Unfortunately her mother is burnt at the stake anyway since the one presiding over the execution, the old count's son and the new count's nephew, Kurt Humbolt (Giorgio Ardisson), is the real murderer. As she dies, Adele swears vengeance on her persecutors.


Burn witch burn!

Later, as the distraught Helene flees, she is ambused by the Count, who murders her and throws her body into the river to conceal his own crimes. Helene's death is duly adjudged a suicide.

Left orphaned but exonerated through the deaths of her mother and sister, the young Elisabeth Karnstein adopted by the Count as one of his household in a display of magnanimity which further helps to conceal his family's crimes whilst also allowing him to feel that he has made amends for his own. Unfortunately for the Count, Elisabeth is reminded of her family's heritage by the family's housekeeper, Grumalda (Laura Nucci), who also lets her in on the secret of where her mother and sister's remains are hidden.

Time passes and Elisabetta (Halina Zalewska) grows into a beautiful young woman. Unable to come to terms with his crime and Kurt's revelation of his guilt, the Count has become ill, leaving Kurt in the position where he can do more or less as he wishes, including forcing Elisabeth to marry him.

But, as a plague sweeps across the land as Adele had cursed, a new woman comes into the Humbolt family's life in the form of the mysterious and beautiful Mary Karnstein (Steele). Almost immediately, Kurt resolves that she will be his, with Mary reciprocating his advances. This, however, only leads them to a new problem: what to do about Elisabeth. A dose of poison provides the cure, but then Kurt begins to wonder if his ex-wife is indeed ex...




The usual mirrors drawing into question identity and reality

To now itemise some of the intertextual connections:

The land ravaged by plague aspect recalls The Masque of the Red Death and thus the Corman Poe cycle, although the Christian rather than Satanic rituals that ensue are perhaps more reminiscent of Bergman's The Seventh Seal.

The family name of Karnstein and the arrival of Mary recall Carmilla and, through it, Mastrocinque's film Crypt of the Vampire. Though one of those rare-seeming Italian Gothics those in which Steele does not appear one nevertheless also gets the impression that the role of the vampire revenant was written with her in mind by Gastaldi, whose scenario there also incorporated a family curse for good measure.

The relationships amongst the Humbolt family are reminiscent of those amongst the Menliffe family in The Whip and the Body – itself another film featuring a more obvious Steele stand-in in the somewhat similar looking Daliah Lavi – as is the role played by the Harriet Medin White like family servant here. The film, directed by Bava and scripted by Gastaldi, also happened to feature a villainous black sheep of the family named none other than Kurt.

The return of characters from beyond the grave in search of revenge also alludes to Bava's Black Sunday and Freda's Hitchcock diptych of The Horrible Secret of Dr Hichcock and Lo Spettro – both penned by Gastaldi – albeit with a pre-modern tendency to inherently accept of supernatural in a manner that somewhat alien to these films and others with similar later settings, including Margheriti's own Castle of Blood which, whilst not written by Gastaldi, purports to be a Poe adaptation and even incorporates the author into its telling.

Beyond this, we also have some murderous black gloves, an iron-maiden type device – as per Margheriti's The Virgin of Nuremberg – and some point-of-view shots from behind its mask, a la Black Sunday.




Hands of doom

While the film isn't perhaps as atmospheric as some of these counterparts, in that there are fewer sequences of characters wandering through the castle and its environs that exist as much for their own sake as to advance the plot, the upside of this is a less somnambulistic pace that may appeal more to those who find the Italian Gothic at times veers too far in the direction of style over all else.

Some explary moments here arise when Elizabeth and the Count 'coincidentally' decide to venture into the castle's dungeons and catacombs at the same time: As Humbolt plead forgiveness from his dead brother and sees his skeleton move: as he flees in terror the camera lingers on for a moment to allow us to see the rat which has nested within Franz's remains and caused the disturbance, thus reminding us that we cannot just replace supernatural discourses and explanations for naturalistic ones to raise a degree of ambiguity over the nature of the plague soon to descent on the Humbolt lands. Then, as Elizabeth and the Count move through the darkness, they do so cautiously but also at speed, each wary of the possible presence of the other, their haste further accentuated by Margheriti's rapid tracking shots and relatively brisk cutting. Finally, as Elizabeth exits through a secret passage once the Count has passed, she emerges before the awaiting Kurt, who duly professes his desire to marry her and thus neatly moves the narrative on to its next sequence and plot point.


Dead




Undead

Though Steele's role perhaps doesn't stretch her abilities, in that she's incarnating much the same diva type as she had done before and would do again, rather than a more fully rounded real character as in Volker Schlondorff's adaptation of Rober Musil's Young Torless – as the kind of film you suspect she would like to have moved into making, post 8½ – she again brings that distinctive physicality and intensity to the role.

Giorgio Ardisson turns in an effective performance as the dastardly Kurt, the kind of villain with no redeeming qualities whatsoever whom we can be justified in hating, to further demonstrate that he was capable of being far more than just the pretty boy type showcased in Bava's Hercules in the Haunted World and Knives of the Avenger. (As he and Elizabeth are blessed by the priest on the occasion of their wedding, Kurt mockingly asks: “There are many people dying in the streets. Shouldn't you recite a prayer for them?”)

Technically the film is accomplished, with attractive black and white cinematography, solid production design and fluid camera work. Carlo Rustichelli delivers an agreeable if unexceptional score: if its tropes are at times predictable, they help further fix us within the film's distinctive world, having much the same function as James Bernard's work for Hammer in this regard.