Blogging Community

http://www.spoilerfreemoviesleuth.com - Courtesy of Rewind FilmIn the annals of Italian giallo thriller fare dominating movie theaters throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Ferruccio Casapinta’s one-and-done gothic horror as giallo hybrid The Doll of Satan remains among the most overlooked chillers of its kind.  Though many will consider this everything-but-the-kitchen-sink hodgepodge a bit of a giallo themed mess, The Doll of Satan is a rare crossbreed that comes off as a bit overstuff with elements of The Devil’s Rain, old fashioned haunted-house ghost stories and even a touch of Scooby Doo thrown in for good measure.  Staunch giallo consumers will be somewhat bewildered by this exercise but as a genre fan it had a few tricks up its sleeve to make it worth your while.Courtesy of Rewind Film After a young couple ventures out to a castle to read the will of Elizabeth’s (Erna Schurer) late uncle and collect her inheritance, she quickly finds herself besieged by numerous murder attempts, evil spirits, a wheelchair bound madwoman, a Satanic torture dungeon and even a swanky bar in the middle of small-town Italy.  If this sounds like a bit overstuffed for a ninety-minute movie, it most certainly is but as with giallo and contemporary film noir the convoluted storytelling style and off-kilter editing go hand in hand with the beats of the genre.  Somewhere between Tod Browning and  More pretty looking and sounding than anything with an oddly tonally awkward keyboard score by A Man Named John composer Franco Potenza and a sumptuous interior decorum illuminating the castle lensed by The Embalmer cinematographer Francesco Attenni, The Doll of Satan never really becomes particularly tense or frightening though it does have numerous scenes of its scantily clad damsel in distress frolicking about.  Mostly though, The Doll of Satan is an odd duck of a film made by a director who never made another film before or since who reportedly left much of the actual directorial duties to his cinematographer.Courtesy of Rewind Film As giallo and as gothic horror, the mixture of the two disparate genres don’t really completely go together here as successfully as some of, say, Mario Bava’s gothic horror giallo hybrids.  Still, as a newcomer quickly digesting as much of this subgenre as boutique labels around the world continue to offer, The Doll of Satan was an interesting if not peculiar giallo entry that doesn’t quite work as well as it should despite the ingredients but remains an interesting outlier in the subgenre’s history. --Andrew Kotwicki (function() { var zergnet = document.createElement('script'); zergnet.type = 'text/javascript'; zergnet.async = true; zergnet.src = (document.location.protocol == "https:" ? "https:" : "http:") + '//www.zergnet.com/zerg.js?id=59239'; var znscr = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; znscr.parentNode.insertBefore(zergnet, znscr); })();