This early D'Amato film bears some affinity to the work of Mario Bava, being a 19th Century Gothic horror long on style and atmosphere if short on coherence. The basic plot involves a brother who raises his sister from the dead (using an old Incan ritual) in order that she gets revenge on those who were responsible for her death; a number of gory murders ensues.
D'Amato attacks the story is a very strange way, deliberately I would presume to emphasise the tale's strangeness and put the audience in a similar position of mystification as the characters find themselves under. This approach is not entirely successful, although the dizzying maze of Dutch angles, stalking and spying POV shots, extreme close-ups (especially of eyes) makes the film constantly compelling. Klaus Kinski gets star billing for what is essentially a bit part as a scientist in a sub-plot (which links with the Incan ritual) and his early demise is problematic, as his appearance and then disappearance have the stench of a red herring.
The film seems to be an extended riff on the idea that human relationships are an unhealthy brew of thwarted desire, jealousy and rage. The most effective moments have the characters stalked by the dead sister, who turns from ravishing beauty to mouldering corpse from shot to shot. The party with masks and the idea that beauty can suddenly turn rotten lead me to suspect that the film is an unacknowledged inspiration for some scenes in Kubrick's The Shining and Eyes Wide Shut.
The finale, with the dead sister being revealed as the old woman cohabiting with the detective, is half-hokum and half inspired derangement of time; like Nicholson's final Shining moment, frozen in a picture from the 1920s, this reveal suggests that the detective has been doomed timelessly to follow a case which is in some ways a re-enactment of is own marital relationship, a reflection of the deadly tortures which seemingly ordinary married people wish to enact on each other. The story bears some similarities to the work of Poe, and like D'Amato's Emanuelle's Revenge, it uses the images of immolation behind a wall from that storyteller's A Cask of Amontillado.
D'Amato attacks the story is a very strange way, deliberately I would presume to emphasise the tale's strangeness and put the audience in a similar position of mystification as the characters find themselves under. This approach is not entirely successful, although the dizzying maze of Dutch angles, stalking and spying POV shots, extreme close-ups (especially of eyes) makes the film constantly compelling. Klaus Kinski gets star billing for what is essentially a bit part as a scientist in a sub-plot (which links with the Incan ritual) and his early demise is problematic, as his appearance and then disappearance have the stench of a red herring.
The film seems to be an extended riff on the idea that human relationships are an unhealthy brew of thwarted desire, jealousy and rage. The most effective moments have the characters stalked by the dead sister, who turns from ravishing beauty to mouldering corpse from shot to shot. The party with masks and the idea that beauty can suddenly turn rotten lead me to suspect that the film is an unacknowledged inspiration for some scenes in Kubrick's The Shining and Eyes Wide Shut.
The finale, with the dead sister being revealed as the old woman cohabiting with the detective, is half-hokum and half inspired derangement of time; like Nicholson's final Shining moment, frozen in a picture from the 1920s, this reveal suggests that the detective has been doomed timelessly to follow a case which is in some ways a re-enactment of is own marital relationship, a reflection of the deadly tortures which seemingly ordinary married people wish to enact on each other. The story bears some similarities to the work of Poe, and like D'Amato's Emanuelle's Revenge, it uses the images of immolation behind a wall from that storyteller's A Cask of Amontillado.