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"Impia tortorum longas hic turba furors / Sanguinis innocui non satiate, aluit..." Lucio Fulci's Middle Ages are unexpectedly like Rossellini's, riddled with tenebrous existentialism and period-movie artifice that flaunts its seams (vide Lady Beatrice with rope burns and eyelashes). Ecclesiastical venality is the theme, the horror is stated near the onset ("We are not here to comfort you, but to save your soul") and pulled into the image of the gaping fissure in the praying chamber. The damsel (Adrienne Larussa) is violated by her avaricious father (Georges Wilson) and gets the smitten servant (Tomas Milian) to slay him, the Church steps in for the punishment, "our Lord's justice" is nowhere to be seen. People don't believe in hell but they believe in pain, Lang once said, and Fulci serves up the entire encyclopedia of corporeal agonies that passed for spiritual cleansing in the Dark Ages and beyond: Sweat on battered walls, crimson lacerations on a pale forehead, stretched sinew turned purple on the rack. The unconventional structure—a passion play within an investigation within a flashback—is part of the terse line bridging Dreyer and Russell's The Devils, the handheld camera keeps discovering El Greco angles. (The Burial of Count Orgaz is cited more than once.) The spectral Beatrice Cenci returns every year carrying her decapitated head, according to legend, though Fulci knows that the living are more terrifying than the dead, and that the glow hitting the heroine at the close is not illumination but the cold sunlight of the gallows. With Mavie Bardanzellu, Antonio Casagrande, Ignazio Spalla, Max Steffen Zacharias, and Raymond Pellegrin.
--- Fernando F. Croce |