His other genre films include:- Medusa Against the Son of Hercules (1962), the Gothic horror The Blancheville Monster (1963), The Triumph of Hercules (1964), the spy film OK Connery/Operation Kid Brother (1967), the giallo The Man with the Icy Eyes (1971), the Antichrist film Holocaust 2000/The Chosen (1977), the superhero film The Pumaman (1980), the psychic film Blood Link (1982), Miami Golem (1985) and Formula for a Murder (1985).It’s The Exorcist, Italian style, in this Satanic shocker from director Alberto De Martino (Shadows in an Empty Room). The Antichrist should not be confused with Lars von Trier’s later film Antichrist (2009) about a woman going mad.Īlberto De Martino was a director in the Italian exploitation genre and covered most genres including the peplum and the giallo. She at least gets full marks for giving the part all she has. Priest Arthur Kennedy’s Bible bursts into flames as he tries to exorcise Carla GravinaĪt least, Carla Gravina gives a performance that manages to cover everything from a frail nervousness to seductress and a wonderfully demented range of evil expressions once she becomes possessed.
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De Martino delivers the exorcism movie standards with one or two occasional novel twists – like having Carla Gravina moving her own wheelchair without using her arms and then levitating up off it and floating out the window or when she causes her hands to disappear and reappear in mid-air to strangle the faith healer (Mario Scaccia). The means whereby Carla Gravina’s ancestor is reawakened and possesses her involves some highly dubious psychological practices – Umberto Orsini’s psychologist treats a patient for the inherited sins of their ancestors that somehow involves reincarnation, which in any real world psychiatric practice would be regarded as outright pseudo-science.Īlberto De Martino goes the full exploitation avenue – with scenes of Carla Gravina laughing madly while frothing at the mouth with both feet up on the dinner table, levitating paintings and furniture, placing burning hands on her brother’s chest. On the other hand, after a great set-up, the second half of the film slips into B-movie standard. There is at least one fine scene where Carla Gravina gets up and walks and then immediately heads out into the countryside, joins a tour of some catacombs, seduces a young man and takes him away, only to kill him. There are often unusual images – Carla Gravina having flashbacks to her ancestor in an orgy that takes place in the midst of a forest where she is cross-temporally raped in a ritual by a figure with an animal head mask. It starts promisingly, opening on some alarmingly realistic seeming scenes of religious hysteria as a group of people come to see the statue of a saint – they frothing, convulsing, even licking the floor. Alberto de Martino does a fantastic job of shooting Rome and the surrounding countryside for maximum pictorial value.įor a time, I started to be extremely impressed with The Antichrist/The Tempter – it seemed to be an exorcism and possession film conducted with lavishly showoff arty flourish. The sets are lavish and exquisitely dressed – hallways with busts of faces carved in relief into the wall (which in one neat effect are later seen with their heads sinisterly turned) the antechambers of the Church where classical paintings cover every available inch of the walls and ceiling indoor fountains location shoots in classical piazzas and buildings cutaways to religious statuary. If nothing else, The Antichrist/The Tempter is the best looking of any Exorcist copy. Other Italian Exorcist copies of this era included The Sexorcist (1974), Beyond the Door (1974), The Night Child (1975), The Return of the Exorcist (1975) and Malabimba (1979), even the spoof The Exorcist: Italian Style (1975). Nobody latched onto doing so like Italian filmmakers – the 1970s was a decade when Italian exploitation cinema was at its peak churning out numerous cheap copies of every major Hollywood hit. The Exorcist (1973) was a massive box-office success worldwide and its possession and exorcism story ended up being copied by numerous imitators.
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