Devil with NO dress on
31 July 2008
This is one of your more blatant Italian "Exorcist" rip-offs. The main difference between this and the original model though (besides the criminally low budget and incompetent film-making) is that the possession here involves an adolescent boy rather than adolescent girl. The devil takes the form of a voluptuously naked, red-headed witch, who the boy first spies while taking pictures of a waterfall. Later when she shows up in his room, he does what any normal teenager would do when confronted by an attractive and willing woman--he tries to strangle her! Then he slashes her throat with a knife which somehow causes his tease of a girlfriend to drop dead miles away where she's frugging to bad music in a disco. Finally, the witch takes control of the boy and uses him to go after his mother and his sister (who's a nun) in quasi-incestuous/quasi-lesbian scenes that only the Italians could (or would) perpetrate. It turns out the witch actually had a relationship way back during the Inquisition with an ancestor/previous incarnation of the sister(they're played by the same actress anyway), and she somehow "impregnated" this ancestor with a devil child, who was spared the latter's burning at the stake. This plot-line is summarily dropped, but it does allow the movie to rip-off Mario Bava's "Black Sunday" as well as "The Exorcist", and even more importantly, it allows for lots of scenes of satanic orgies and that old Italian favorite--hot, naked nun sex!

With the exception of the most famous (and most boring)of them, "Beyond the Door", all of these Italian "Exorcist" knock-offs added a lot of sex into the mix. Some are satanic movies with sex ("The Antichrist", "Damned in Venice", "Ring of Darkness") while others could be better describe as sex movies with a little satanism ("The Eerie Midnight Horror Show", "Malabimba"). This movie is roughly half and half with a lot of nude scenes by the sister, the mother, and obviously the witch. This might keep heterosexual male viewers, at least, from slipping into a boredom-induced coma. The movie really suffers, however, from a lack of name or even recognizable actors. Richard Conte collects an easy paycheck by showing up at the very end as the exorcist. Partizia Gorzi, who plays the sister/nun, was in the giallo "Crazy Desires of a Murderer", and also played another ill-fated woman in Joe D'Amato's sleaze classic "Emanuelle's Revenge".

I'd definitely recommend this to all the Italian devil movie completists out there--but that might be tantamount to recommending it to myself. As for everyone else, uhhh. . .
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