70's Italian Horror Part Twenty-One

SOMETHING CREEPING IN THE DARK

(1971)

Dir - Mario Colucci

Overall: MEH

 

The second of only two completed films to be directed by screenwriter Mario Colucci, Something Creeping in the Dark, (Qualcosa striscia nel buio, Creeping in the Night, Shadows in the Dark), is a horridly slow old dark house/giallo hybrid of sorts.  Colucci had been sitting on the story for a decade by the time he got around to making it with a handful of recognizable genre faces on board including Giacomo Rossi Stuart, Stelvio Rosi, and American Farley Granger as a criminal on the run named Spike.  Certain sequences, (including the ending), are wonderfully creepy, involving eerie breathing noises, POV camera work, and stark lighting as a houseful of strangers hold up due to lousy weather and closed-off roads.  On paper, a plot involving the ghost of a dead occultist who possess people one at a time while most of the lights are off should wield more chilling results though.  The film regularly detours to characters simply standing around either doing nothing, having repetitive conversations with each other, or, (in the case of an off-putting housekeeper), going into a room where he either hits or has sex with a girl who is not wearing pants.  Whatever that is about.  Something Italian probably.

IL PRATO MACCHIATO DI ROSSO

(1973)

Dir - Riccardo Ghione

Overall: WOOF

Euro-trash at its "best" could be bizarrely inciting; weaving its exploitative sleaze in a manner where genre cliches, laughable melodrama, and hip soundtracks could wield something so strange and silly that it can be memorable at the very least.  Often times though, these movies just sucked.  The last directorial effort from writer Riccardo Ghione, (who was only behind the lens on four movies in his career), Il prato macchiato di rosso, (The Red-Stained Lawn, The Bloodstained Lawn), is a completely boring mess that squanders a ridiculous premise.  An eccentric husband/wife duo who absolutely despise each other make a habit of taking in stray hippies, drug addicts, gypsies, or any other vagabond-lifestyled people so that they can lay them on a table and have a robot drain them of blood in order to sell it on the black market.  Said robot is kept in the living room as groovy decor and most of the idiots who are soon to be victims hardly bat an eye at a shower that shoots wine, nightly orgies, and large curtains designed like private parts.  The whole thing sounds far more interesting on paper than it translates to on the screen as Ghione's sense of pacing is abysmal, none of the characters are either interesting or likable, and so very little happens that most viewers will fail to even notice the wacky bits when they do appear.

THE RETURN OF THE EXORCIST

(1975)

Dir - Angelo Pannacciò/Luca Damiano

Overall: MEH

Director Angelo Pannacciò's immediate follow-up to the wretchedly awful Sex of the Witch was one of countless Italian rip-offs of The Exorcist, being the apply titled The Return of the Exorcist, (Un urlo dalle tenebre, Exorcist 3: Cries and Shadows, The Possessor, Un Urlo Dalle Tenebre, Naked Exorcist).  Allegedly, Pannacciò was a replacement for Luca Damiano midway through shooting, the latter being particularly prominent throughout the following decades making porn.  In any event, this stands as one of the more inventive if still unabashedly silly cash grabs that jumped on and plagiarized as much from William Friedkin's masterpiece as allowed.  That said, it throws a whole lot of other nonsense in such as a Satanic cult, a cursed amulet, insane asylum footage, disco footage, and nudity, plus the main concept of a teenage boy being the one possessed by a female witch who regularly switches bodies with him.  It all still ends up with the required exorcism finale where the evil forces at play may as well just be Lucifer himself or another high ranking demon since Richard Conte, (in his final role), removes them with the usual "In the name of Jesus" mumbo jumbo.  The movie takes some slow, derivative detours at too many intervals to keep the wacky, blasphemous high jinks going, but when they do get going, they are a hoot.