Saturday, August 30, 2014

Rare Flix: Tragic Ceremony

Front-loading my Netflix Queue with the Long Wait and Very Long Wait films proved to net some interesting results.  Today's film is Tragic Ceremony, a fairly-obscure Italian film with some notable people working on it.  This 1972 film tells the tale of some youths that get pushed towards a creepy house and discover a dark secret.  Notable Cast includes a pre-I Spit on Your Grave Camille Keaton (although this came out the same year as What Have You Done To Solange?) and Your Vice Is A Locked Room And Only I Have The Key star Luigi Pastilli.  The Credits of its Director and Writers include The Iguana With The Tongue of Fire, The Erotic Adventures of Zorro and Lucio Fulci's The Maniacs.  Interesting collection of work, no?  A man who's work you will see, but not know him directly for it is the late Carlo Rambaldi, who did notable Special Effects work on a number of films.  You may not know his name, but he did create the design of E.T., made the head work in Alien, designed the creatures in Dune and designed 'Dagoth' from Conan the Destroyer.  A notable, but also dubious, credit he has is also the Special Effects Man behind Medusa Against The Son of Hercules!  Of course, he doesn't do a whole lot here (save for one scene), so that whole bit was mostly just to show off how much IMDB research that I do (sometimes).  The film is weird and lopsided, so let's not dally any longer.  To see how this film has a completely different title in Italian, read on...
Basically, we get a bunch of rich jerks traveling around for a bit.  They are...well, jerks.  To highlight this...
They show us a random flashback to explain that a necklace that our hero gives to Keating was originally given to his Mother...who didn't want it after he told the item's dark past.  Naturally, he just steals it right back...
In a long, drawn-out bit, the group ends up with just enough gas to get to a mysterious house (after being hassled by the only Gas Station Attendent for miles) and meeting up with some...friendly rich folks.  I see no ulterior motive here.
Cutting to the chase, here is the best part of the movie.  Basically, the group break up the (American) titular event and all hell breaks loose with the drug-addled rich folk.  This is where Rambaldi shines...

Shot in the gut!
Splitting headache!
Leaking head!
Feel the bang!
After that chaos at around the forty-five minute mark, it is hard to make out exactly where it goes from there.  To sum it up as best as I can, the group find out the Police are investigating the scene...
...they feel bad (why?), all but Keating die, leading to her...spirit going out on the loose (I think)...
...and I guess the Baroness lady killing her.  This guy tries to explain it, but he's not much help.  See for yourself.  The End.
Damn- that was just a big, old pile of weird!  Slow build, crazy middle scene and bizarre slow-burn to the finale.  It is that up and down!  There's also the two or three random flashbacks to give back-story on our lead which feel out of place.  It is like they shot them and knew that they needed to be shown (since they set up the dissension with the mother), but couldn't decide where they went.  The solution: just show them whenever you feel like!  I didn't necessarily hate the Characters like I tend to in the worst of Modern Horror Films, but I was a lot less interested in them than I was perhaps supposed to be.  They are just not good people, really.  I liked enough parts of the film to recommend it to Horror buffs and fans of Eurotrash films like this.  If it were a more even mix (despite having three Writers!), I could definitely recommend it alot more.  It has crazy, crazy elements of Old-School (Practical) Horror Films that are a sight to see.  The packaging around those moments is both too confusing to be arty and too arty to be reach a bigger audience.  On the plus side, they already got to work on painting my new floor...
Next up, a rare film from England courtesy of TV's Svengoolie.  The Cat knows and sees all!  Stay tuned...

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