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Lisa (Elke Sommer) is the tourist lost in the streets of a Spanish villa, the Devil is the butler (Telly Savalas) with beret and puff of smoke in the antique shop, his face adorns the medieval fresco outside. In Mario Bava's "tall-tale of gloom and tradition," even the act of getting in a car triggers an unsettling visual effect—headlights turn up like a blazing sun in the blueish darkness, the heroine runs toward them and melts into the glow. She finds herself stranded in a mansion with a wealthy couple (Sylva Koscina, Eduardo Fajardo) and "the smell of death," Alida Valli as the blind Contessa adduces a note of D'Annunzio while the servant hums "Say It with Flowers" and crams a too-tall cadaver into a coffin. The scion (Alessio Orano) is a necrophiliac brooder whose bedroom goes from Psycho chamber to enchanted garden and back, the visitor might be the reincarnation of the old lover who's now a chortling skeleton. (For her own part, Lisa relishes the soft-focus reverie until the Reaper materializes amid the music-box figurines and a wax dummy stares by the window.) Ghosts before vampires, "they somehow keep all the horror without spilling any blood," right on cue an upside-down reflection of the Savalas leer on a splatter of wine. Wedding and funerals share the same sacramental morbidity, "a very simple explanation" does not apply to the panoply of mannequins, skulls, statues and clocks. (Cf. Chabrol's Alice ou la dernière fugue.) "Far beyond the formalized art of its day," the Bava mise en scène at the service of a bald trickster tremendously enjoying the follia around him. With Gabriele Tinti, Espartaco Santoni, and Kathy Leone.
--- Fernando F. Croce |