"Don't try and understand it," says one character here, standing in what may be another dimension while green and red light plays over his face. I think I'll take his advice.
Although this doesn't quite top Renato Polselli's Mania in terms of delirious insanity, it gives it a good try! Set...somewhere...it involves a young girl being taken to a castle by her stepfather (Micky Hargity) 'round about the time where a young girl is sacrificed by four cloaked cultists who remove her heart and promise that a girl called Isabel will be born again. Isabel by the way is chained up to a wall where the cultists live (it might not actually be a place at all), and she has a huge burned hole in her chest, like someone has stubbed out the world's biggest cigar there. This being a Gothic horror film, the young girl (Laureen) is either Isabel reincarnated or her doppelganger. I'm none the wise even though I just watched the thing. Oh, and someone gets attacked by bats and their heart ripped out by an unknown person in the real world. Jesus. One paragraph in and I'm already struggling.
Before the plot completely unravelled I managed to understand that Hargity had bought a bit of a castle but there was a strange cultist guy living in another bit of the castle. There are also seven virgins there to celebrate Laureen's engagement to Richard.There was also a creepy caretaker type and a guy with a twitch who fancied an over the top ditzy girl who both supplied comedy at all the wrong times. We also get a very lengthy flashback where Isabel is impaled and burned at the stake which goes on forever but also seems to highlight that everyone in this film is a reincarnation of someone from 500 years ago. I've got a headache now.
I'm still making this sound straightforward! With all the time travelling, flashbacks, dimension hopping, screaming, comedy and people possibly being vampires but possibly not being vampires, you'd be forgiven for thinking that this film is bad, but it's not! I doesn't make any sense, but the whole film from start to finish seems to be intended as some sort of visual LSD tripe. Polselli's can barely film a scene in a normal fashion, with rapid editing from multiple angles (including upside down for extra insanity), bathing people in gel lighting that constantly changes, or intercutting scenes so rapidly you'd swear you were going to have a seizure.
Between this and the film Mania I'm not sure what Polselli was aiming for, but I have no regrets going along for the ride. Both of these films are amongst the most insane, entertaining films Italian cinema has to offer. I've no doubt left out about 90% of what happens in this film.