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Moxey's The City of the Dead is a recent memory in the opening view of an accused witch's curse shouted from within the pyre, "divine justice" at work. The woman's older daughter (Barbara Steele) is raped and slain by the Count (Giuliano Raffaelli), "horror has invaded the soul" of the younger daughter (Halina Zalewska), who grows up into her ringer and is forced to marry the nobleman's son (George Ardisson). A plague upon the land, vengeance will be carried out—a thunderbolt on a grave puts flesh back on the skeleton, and who's standing at the chapel doorway but Steele in all her cadaverous sumptuousness? "Whose on earth is this body?" Antonio Margheriti's medieval opera, a companion piece to Castle of Blood and, it turns out, Clouzot's Diabolique. Iron gates to keep dying peasants out, endless corridors for elongated El Greco figures to skulk about. Superstition and corruption fortify the order, fright finishes off the paterfamilias and madness eats away at the scion, the priest (Umberto Raho) waits for power and the maid (Laura Nucci) plays crafty witness. A Le Fanu theme, "a real symbolic representation." The bride's trembling is the lout's delight, the mistress who resembles her sister makes a fine replacement, poison resolves any conjugal discord. (The model is Bava or Freda, but the Buñuel of Abismos de Pasión.) All passages lead to the catacombs, the patient set-up builds to a necrophiliac stinger: "It's a pity you did everything for a body that's dead." The upshot is the terrified eye peeking from behind the hollow socket of a Reaper effigy, for the benefit of The Wicker Man. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |