(1963)
Dir - Giuseppe Veggezzi
Overall: WOOF
The only film ever made by Giuseppe Vegezzi, Katarsis, (Sfida al diavolo, Challenge the Devil), inexplicably stars Christopher Lee who apparently owed someone a favor or something. While it is not altogether incompetent since the film is occasionally photographed in an atmospheric fashion, it is still a laughable mess. There are preposterous scenes like a bunch of drunk assholes dancing around fully clothed which the movie constitutes as a diabolical "orgy" and a long, claustrophobic and awkward take of the same assholes, (very), slowly walking up a staircase. Dialog like "Whisky! Whisky! Drugs! Drugs!" followed by "I want some drugs as well." gives a rather routine example of the high caliber of screenwriting present. Of course, the biggest detriment is tortuously slow pacing. Mostly told in flashbacks, it gives off the unmistakable feel that the original cut was far too short so they quickly wrote and shot more utterly pointless material to flesh it all out. This includes a moment at a nightclub where several female singers perform one after the other without advancing a single element of the plot whatsoever. The conclusion which is meant to be a surreal and dark trek into random madness is so absolutely moronic that it would warrant momentous laughter if not again for how utterly boring it simultaneously is.
(1965)
Dir - Massimo Pupillo
Overall: MEH
It says something when director Massimo Pupillo was indifferent enough concerning his work on Terror-Creatures from the Grave, (5 tombe per un medium), to willingly use the alias Ralph Zucker and further distance himself from the project. With yet another set up of a dead guy in a creepy villa needing his will gone over, the movie is off to a derivative start and never recovers from there. Even for a low-budget horror film produced in the 60s, the pacing is cripplingly tortoise-like. At one point a guy in a wheelchair stabs himself with a sword and then we see some monster hands for whatever reason, all of which takes absolutely forever and constitutes as one of the most impressively boring death scenes ever filmed. There is a mystery that never picks up any momentum, no even remotely spooky set pieces, and the characters have absolutely zero charisma top to bottom, including a wasted Barbara Steele who seems to disappear entirely from the movie for large periods at a time. It is pretty much a failure in every detail that it may be setting out to achieve, but it us so unremarkable in doing so that it deserves to be forgotten about more than it deserves anyone's outright scorn.
(1968)
Dir - Elio Petri
Overall: GOOD
One of the strangest and ultimately most pretentious horror films possibly ever made in Italy was Elio Petri's A Quiet Place in the Country, (Un tranquillo posto di campagna, Un coin tranquille à la campagne). Based off of the wonderfully named Oliver Onion's own short story "The Beckoning Fair One", the pacing certainly is not sluggish. Instead it is quite frantic with Petri's frequent collaborator Luigi Kuveiller's incredibly busy camera work. This enhances the chaos along with lightning-fast editing and incessantly surreal images that mix flashbacks and hallucinations to confuse what may or may not be actually happening. Django himself Franco Nero's performance from the get go is unmistakably of an unstable man, just as much as Vanessa Redgrave's is of an unstable, ultimately vulnerable partner in their bizarre relationship. The images themselves are hyper-sexual and violent and the film could be saying something metaphorically about the struggling, depraved artist or it could "simply" be a visually over the top, cinematic unraveling of a tortured one. The intentionally avant-garde presentation would seem indulgently absurd and may in fact be so to some, but it is so consistent and relentless that Petri's ambitious vision cannot be considered anything but fully realized.
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