Italian Poster
Black Magic Rites (aka The Reincarnation of Isabel and Riti, magie nere e segrete orge nel trecento…) is a 1973 Italian psychedelic occult horror film directed by Renato Polselli (Delirium). It stars Mickey Hargitay, Rita Calderoni (Nude for Satan), Tano Cimarosa, Christa Barrymore and Raul Lovecchio.
A British Channel Four TV documentary, Porn on the Brain, to be broadcast on September 30th 2013 at 10pm, includes brief clips from Black Magic Rites and Luigi Batzella’s Nude for Satan. The documentary has been widely covered in the press already as it claims that watching pornography triggers the same addictive areas of the brain as drugs and alcohol!
Hundreds of years ago, a Jack Nelson (Mickey Hargitay) was restrained while he watched his lover Isabella (Rita Calderoni) burned at the stake for witchery. His threat that she will live again overtakes his life and he spends the next several centuries refining the method to reincarnate his precious lover. His obsession turns him into a monster, walking the Earth in search of virgins to kidnap in his attempt to raise his lover from the grave. A party of people arrive and Jack closes in…
Polselli is clearly working in the same area that often attracted the likes of Dario Argento, Lucio Fulci, Mario Bava, Jean Rollin and Jesus Franco – not to mention a whole bunch of arthouse directors like Jacques Rivette, Sergei Paradjanov and Alain Renais – where the narrative takes second place to the visual and the atmospshere. Here, a coherent, conventional and linear narrative is abandoned in favour of cinematic delirium, resulting in a film that is one of the most hallucinogenic that I’ve ever seen. Everything is heightened beyond reality here – the dialogue, the acting, the characters, the music (which goes from moody to comical to furious progressive rock) and the visuals all reach a point of hysteria that is so far removed from reality that the suggestions that this is a ‘bad’ film that has ended up the way it is through incompetence are rendered laughable. This is a very deliberate trip into weirdness. The film’s editing (also by Polselli) is furious and often builds all the other elements to a point of absolute hysteria, as well as allowing little off-key touches that help make this a bizarre, dreamlike experience.
The film has more bare breasts than most softcore films (and again includes the nudity so randomly and incongruously that it feels more like a deliberate expansion of the surreal than a desire to titillate) and has gore that is both graphic and unrealistic – not just in terms of the effects, but the execution – when Isabel is staked through the heart, she remains alive and conscious. The lighting too is designed to startle – four years before Suspiria, this is a film awash with vivid reds and greens. And there is barely a moment when something interesting isn’t happening.
Black Magic Rites is one of the most deranged films you could ever hope to see, a high note of hysteria and hallucination that barely pauses for breath, and where excess is never enough.
David Flint – Strange Things Are Happening
“I still can’t work out what it’s meant to be about, despite the fact that one of the characters spends a good ten minutes totally unsuccessfully explaining the plot at the end. What I can say is that it’s set in a castle, that there’s an awful lot of female nudity, some very poor Satanic rituals executed by men in red baby romper suits, and that some of the fashions were probably designed by blind people who had been cruelly lied to about the materials with which they had been provided.” John Llewellyn Probert, House of Mortal Cinema
Buy on Redemption Blu-ray from Amazon.com
“I have seen some crazy movies. I have even seen some completely insane, inexplicable and just plain weird movies. But nothing I have been subjected to thus far has readied me for writer/director Renato Polselli‘s madness in Black Magic Rites. I reviewed his incredibly sordid and violent slasher Delirium not long ago but not even that could have prepared me for this sublimely artistic, sexy and satanic Euro-sleaze. The closest film I can think of that even comes close to the absurdity on parade here is Luigi Batzella’s Nude for Satan. But even that doesn’t hold a candle to this madness.” Greg Baty, Cinesploitation
“…if it’s a little too absurd to be rightly considered a masterpiece it is still a ridiculously entertaining and completely bizarre slice of Italian exploitation well worth revisiting on Blu-ray.” Ian Jane, Rock! Shock! Pop!
Post by Will Holland
