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Franju's Pleins feux sur l'assassin is a useful precedent, in a tale of ancestral horrors and convex lenses. "Back to the earth, back to my roots," the heir (Antonio Cantafora) in the Austrian castle full of Escher interiors and gelatinous spirals. The medieval baron was an avid impaler, a torturer of villagers cursed to infernal agonies, unwisely resurrected by the protagonist and the architecture student (Elke Sommer). "I wouldn't play with the occult if I were you," warns the scientific uncle (Massimo Girotti) in vain. The fiend is a rotting mummy under a slouch hat, an oil portrait scratched out but for his staring eyes, and a wealthy restorer grinning from his wheelchair (Joseph Cotten). His first victim in the modern epoch is the local doctor, the camera zooms in on a drop of blood on the floor for a Miró impression before dissolving into abstraction. "Sadist" and "insane" are "matters of terminology" to the monster who adorns his tower with skewered bodies, "magnificent effect." Mario Bava's lush variant of Black Sunday, with a beady eye on the Coke machine in the ancient building. The chase through dark streets is suffused with colored mist, the mandatory Lorre-esque creep wakes up in the iron maiden just in time to see a spike bearing down upon his face. The past is a gruesome Teutonic dungeon, the wronged sorceress will be heard, courtesy of a scraggly clairvoyant (Rada Rassimov). "Mortals are such fools! Once you killed innocent witches, now you bring murderers back to life." (A striking composite image of spiritualist and pyre encapsulates the séance.) Her laughter echoes through the climactic comeuppance, with reference to Kenton's Island of Lost Souls. With Luciano Pigozzi, Umberto Raho, Valeria Sabel, and Nicoletta Elmi.
--- Fernando F. Croce |