Black Magic Rites

In attempt to cobble together some sort of summary:  Several hundred years ago, Isabel (Rita Calderoni from the nearly as fu*ked up Nude For Satan and the much more coherently twisted Delirium) was burned at the stake while her lover (Hungary's own Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mickey Hargitay, also from Delirium) looks on helplessly. In the present day a group of Satanists led by the descendant of Isabel’s lover attempt to resurrect her still-rotting corpse through sacrifice of not-so-innocent victims, generally plucked from some kind of gathering that appears to be taking place in a nearby castle (I think).

How do you sum up a plot that comes across as predominantly incomprehensible? I’m not sure but I don’t think it matters so much in this case: Black Magic Rites is a psychedelic whirlwind of insane events and imagery that just has the viewer sitting there shaking their bewildered head at the fact that anything like this was ever committed to celluloid. There is plenty of nudity and some of the strangest characters ever created - one particularly potty woman is found hysterical on the stairs after supposedly being assaulted by a monster with ‘green hair, like all monsters’ (???) that nobody, including us, has ever seen. There’s something to do with vampirism in here too - apparently there are some family ties to Dracula even claimed along the way. Even as far as Euro-Horror is concerned, this film is booting sanity out the window with almost randomly strung-together sequences of celluloid that could easily have been shot by somebody off their merry head on drugs, but it sort of works as an escape into psychologically unbalanced surrealism and is helped if your perception is chemically manipulated at the time (in my case, inebriation). The late Renato Polselli has crafted some interesting work to be honest - the aforementioned Delirio Caldo/Delirium (1972) is pretty good and comparatively 'normal'! Previously he also made a more conventional Italian Gothic horror with L’Amante del Vampiro/Vampire and the Ballerina (1960), a bewitching piece that dances around in the same ballpark as Playgirls and the Vampire.

The original mouthful of a title for Black Magic Rites (1973) was Riti, Magie Nere e Segrete Orge Nel Trecento (or Black Magic Rites & the Secret Orgies of the 14th Century).  The print of the old US DVD by Redemption (entitled Reincarnation of Isabel) was apparently ultrasonically cleaned before the digital master of the time was created - apart from an excess of dirt/damage visible throughout it didn't look too bad considering the source, being moderately detailed. Under its Black Magic Rites moniker (as was the UK DVD plus a later release by Redemption in the US) on Kino Lorber/Redemption's Blu-ray, the disc was bare bones (bundled merely with a few trailers for a couple of the Rollin and Bava BDs that the company also put out) the image quality was improved in terms of detail and colour, though still quite scratchy and damaged (not something that bothers me personally).  Aside from the unfortunate cropping (albeit slight) of the image to 1.78:1 (damn that ratio!) the Blu-ray is a worthwhile step up from whatever you owned before.  As with those earlier discs we thankfully got the Italian language soundtrack with very clear English subtitles (BD subtitles are much clearer and neater than the digitised looking text we had to put up with on DVD). 

Later still, Indicator have once again hit the ball far out of the park with a limited edition release (separately on Blu-ray and 4K according to your delectation).  The attractive and quality-screaming packaging is in the vein of their Jean Rollin titles, a lavish inner case containing the disc, a beautiful book, all contained in a slipcase.  No BS artcards or other things that you will never pick up again, the money here has gone into the important stuff.  And most importantly is a proper restoration of the film itself – which once could very easily have been lost forever given its history - looking quite staggering compared to everything else, we now have fine, consistent grain with a cleaned image that must be definitive in its presentation.  Audio once again is Italian (with English subtitles), again very clear.  The extras package also belittles all previous discs – of note is a thirty minute consideration of Renato’s work (including 1999 interview footage with the director himself, courtesy of Pete Tombs) and a superb forty minute talk on the work leading up to Black Magic Rites by Stephen Thrower, including his own attempted analysis of the film.  Whether it’s the Blu-ray or the UHD, this is a critical release from Indicator for lovers of Euro-Horror and strange cinema, something that I really hope leads to a reappraisal of Renato Polselli's work, and the restoration/release of some of the films that I've been unable to see hitherto.

Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things

Night of the Living Dead was, as most reasonably knowledgeable film fans are aware, responsible for drastically altering the landscape of zombie cinema through transformation of the sub-genre from folkloric curiosity to something altogether more terrifying. In its wake followed outings directly influenced by its impact and success as this transformation continued its periodic evolutionary steps beyond the film’s first sequel right up to the present day, where the undead devils have now often learned to sprint faster than their living counterparts. But going back to the period between 1968 and 1978 (where Dawn of the Dead made its own indelible indentation) there were some interesting works being produced around the globe that pretty much had Night… to thank for their existence while possessing enough qualities to propel them to positions of value in their own right. 1972's Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things (i.e. immature teens shouldn’t mess with black magic and corpses, as we all know from personal experience, natch...) is one such piece that’s survived to be noticed through the last few decades but continues to attract completely varying opinions.

The narrative ideas of the film clearly owe a lot to Night… where a group of people become trapped in an isolated house against a relentless onslaught of the rotting dead, although reciting the story in a little more detail goes something like this: self-proclaimed creative force, Alan, hires a troupe of young adults/wannabe actors to travel to a small island for a night’s fun interfering with the black arts via rituals and the like, something that’s almost exclusively designed to provide him with some amusement thereby breaking up what must be ongoing personal boredom with the more mundane aspects of life. It’s soon the middle of night and they are gathered for reasons unknown at the island’s graveyard.  Following some embarrassment at the apparent failure of his expression of satanic rites one of the troupe shows Alan how it 'should' be done, everyone laughing before the budding director forces them to take a corpse from its resting place back to their cabin for a bit more tomfoolery. Some of them go along with it, some are understandably perturbed, but Alan heads further down the road of pushing taste to its boundaries for the sake of attention and the sheer amusement of revelling in other people’s distress. Then the graves outside begin opening up - it seems Alan’s ritual (or the more theatrical one that followed it) was a success after all, and within minutes a horde of the walking dead approaches and surrounds the cabin in a thirst for vengeance.

Where Night… was very straight faced in its dealing of the material, the tactic here is somewhat different: the first half of the film takes a persistently facetious angle as it presents its characters to us, most of whom are wisecracking teens that are endearingly lacking in pessimism. Heading the group is Alan (actually Alan Ormsby, one of the scriptwriters and special make-up effects artists on the crew - this sort of thing happens in low budget productions…). Alan is possibly the character that makes or breaks this film for most viewers due to his relentless arrogance and obnoxiousness. And it goes on and on to a point where viewers might wonder if anything horrifying (beyond the barrage of verbal gags) is ever going to happen. That’s why, for me, this film is creatively successful - when the shit does hit the fan its impact is multiplied. It goes from comic to dark in one very swift turn and the contrast lends the nastier second half an edge it might not otherwise have had - sort of a similar effect to that of Shaun of the Dead, or An American Werewolf in London, though not quite in the same class. It’s the stuff that gets on everyone’s nerves that ultimately aids the payoff, if people can just see past the things that are getting on their nerves of course… For this reason, the film works much better on multiple viewings. The show-stopping corpse rising sequence is something that Night… (and in the extras someone incorrectly suggests that it was the first time it was ever done on film – presumably they had not seen Hammer’s classic Plague of the Zombies) never had and it’s remarkably executed, having an air of the sinister and uncanny about it. Here and throughout, it should be noted that the brilliantly psychedelic electronic soundtrack plays an incredible part in crafting the weird atmosphere.  The teens’ comedic and dramatic interactions up until that point turn to disbelieving terror as the final third spirals upward to a chilling climax and a final shot that hints at something apocalyptic on the horizon.

This has been consistently available in one form or another for years. In the video age it would surface time and again with the crafty re-titling tactics of small video distribution companies that would trick fools like me into repeatedly buying the same film (Revenge of the Living Dead for example, neither title nor (extremely bad) cover artwork bearing resemblance to the real film it was selling). There was a DVD from VCI in the US that then became the most acceptable way of viewing Children… for a long time (in the post laserdisc era), but its non-anamorphic, dark and indistinct picture was not entirely desirable by modern standards. Anchor Bay UK then released a UK DVD and improved things in some respects: we had a clearer anamorphic transfer, multiple (and unnecessary in the case of DTS 5.1!) sound options, and a commentary by Alan Ormsby. The problem with the AB disc was that it consisted of a shorter version of the film; the ball was well and truly dropped on that one. After a brief transfer hiccup that involved the discs being temporarily recalled, a marginally better edition was put out later on in the US by VCI again: anamorphic enhancement for the full length version (approximately 87 minutes), another commentary, and several short featurettes. Later on, Nucleus (UK) released Children... as a double DVD bill with Bob Clark's subsequent film, Dead of Night, but possibly as a final statement VCI again returned to the film with two editions, Blu-ray and 4K, the source of which I believe is used for the 101 Films Blu-ray I have here.

Audio demonstrates some hiss and occasional mis-synching by a few frames, though is serviceable overall (gone are the old artificial surround tracks of the Anchor Bay era).  The HD video transfer may disappoint on initial glance, although with some tweaks to the display controls (particularly brightness and contrast) to balance out the elevated gray scales it doesn’t look too bad.  There is a relative absence of grain but the colours boast surprising vibrancy.  I think it has to be borne in mind that this is an early seventies very low budget (around fifty thousand dollars I believe) horror movie shot often at night, it may be that the raw materials have offered all the detail they’re ever going to.  After getting used to this image, embellished by the aforementioned display tweaks, in viewing I settled down to enjoy the film as it should be.

101 Films have included a number of VCI-sourced extras, including (where VCI demonstrate their technical ineptitude with audio quality so poor it requires subtitling!) interview footage with Alan (who reveals why he and Clark stopped talking later in their careers as well as their original intention to shoot a follow-up), and retrospective appreciation for Clark’s character and work.  An 11 minute or so on-stage Q&A is a welcome addition, as is commentary from Alan along with a couple of other cast members.  Two music videos by a band somewhat obsessed with necrophilia, a gallery and trailer round out a decent package.  This edition also comes with a welcome reversible sleeve (although the infamous cartoon sofa cover is unfortunately neither of the options), and was released both in isolation and as part of a Clark boxed set.  All in all, this movie is a minor cult item that can bring rewards to the more patient viewer of the macabre.  Despite the imperfections of the transfer, this release is very much appreciated on UK shores for this fan in particular.  P.S. It’s also the longer version rather than the truncated cut which Anchor Bay got hold of.