I Watch 'Em So You Don't Have To

Classic Sleaze



Nuda per Satana
(Nude For Satan) (1974) Italy

I'd heard of exploitation films, those being especially popular in the 70's. There were also a rash of (usually foreign) smut horror (I guess some would call it horror porn) cranked out as cheaply as possible and distributed to whatever country would let it in I guess. This little gem (she said with a cough and rolling her eyes) caught my attention purely because it was called 'a classic example of 70's sleaze'. I didn't know you could put 'classic' and 'sleaze' in the same sentence but hey, here we are.

To say this is a horrid piece of film is not just commenting on the exploitation, the misspellings of words in the credits AND the close captioning, the gratuitous nudity or the total lack of story - it's the photography, the fact that it is dubbed into English and the close captioning is a totally different script, the sound track that is either so irritating you turn off the sound or funny that you laugh your butt off. I was alternately amused and bored and fast forwarding through this non-story of, I'm guessing, a house of Satan worship that really didn't do much of anything. It was bought by the film company Redemption - I've mentioned that one before, it has a rather lewd company, ummm, film snippet.

I have the most horrid feeling we're in a really bad nudie film...

We start with this fellow who I could have sworn introduced himself as Harry Benson but referred to in the movie either as 'Peter' or as 'William' so I really couldn't tell you what the hell his name is. He's a doctor making a house call in his white VW Bug (Here's the funny soundtrack part - they made his VW sound like an Aston Martin or some other race car going at top speeds when he was driving quite leisurely along a country road). He gets lost, then gets in an almost-wreck when he sees a woman on the side of the road. He stops, she's gone. He starts to get in his car and hears a car crash. He turns and OH MY GOD IT'S RUBBER IT'S HAUNTING ALL THE MOVIES I SEE HELP HELP HELP..... seriously though, this rubber tire sans rim is rolling down the road at him, although the wrecked car with a woman hanging out of it has all of its tires. It gets worse...

It being the 70's and no phones and no EMTs around the doctor picks the woman up and puts her in his car. He then realizes he's directly in front of a mansion. All lights on. He just remembers to look up, is all. Most of horror movie problems would be solved if people just took a second to look up once in a while...

Okay this could go on way too long for what this film is worth so this is the gist: The castle is full of Satan worshipers, two of which are doppelgangers of our doctor and the injured female. We have gratuitous nude scenes, as for sex scenes, there's a lot of above-the-waist stuff if you know what I mean but little else. The man and woman find that they can't seem to get out no matter how they try. It turns night and day like a faucet in this movie, and it's supposed to be that way so... but the zooming in and out while keeping it out of focus, plus the old 'Batman' series trick of tipping the camera to the right and left when things are supposed to be sinister was just nauseating.

This scene obviously signifies.... pfft, that there's a naked woman?

Funniest part? The woman falls in this spider web (as real as any you'd find in Wal Mart) and a spider pinata (no joke, that's the first thing the hubby called it) is lowered down onto her breasts to, I dunno, motorboat her? The doctor, with a GUN tells her to HOLD STILL and proceeds to try to SHOOT the thing off her chest. I'm not kidding. The second shot hits the spider and oops, the husband is wrong, 'cause candy doesn't come out - very definite white cotton stuffing blows out of the thing. Which starts a chain reaction of things exploding for no reason, the reading from a diabolical book on 'Ashtharoth' (close but no cigar people, it's Ashtaroth) and lots of the promised naked people dancing for Satan. Again, all for no reason except maybe that the movie is near the end. The two try to escape but... you know, I really don't know but all of a sudden they are back in their cars as in the beginning - he's alive but apparently she's unconscious or dead. Both now have medallions that mean... absolutely nothing. The end.

Needless to say that's my fill of 'exploitation' movies unless something like the original 'Blackula' or something a bit more, uh, tasteful comes up...