Satan's Baby Doll (1982)

Director: Mario Bianchi

Writers: Gabriele Crisanti, Piero Regnoli

Composer: Nico Catanese

Starring: Jaqueline Dupre, Marina Hedman, Aldo Sambrell, Giuseppe Carbone, Giancarlo Del Duca, Alfonso Gaita, Mariangela Giordano

More info: IMDb

Tagline: Tender young flesh seduced by the ultimate evil!

Plot: In the crypt of the remote castle of the Aguilars lies the recently-deceased body of Maria. Her husband Antonio is a jealous bully, his mute brother Ignazio is in a wheelchair peeping on his caretaker Sol, a novice. Also present are Miria, the couple's virginal daughter, and Isidro, a factotum who fears Satan's power. A frequent visitor is Juan Suarez, a doctor who wants Miria in a sanatorium for a month. She doesn't want to go. Isidro tries to exorcize the castle's evil spirits. Bodies pile up. Is Miria's mother truly dead, and who is Satan's tool?

My rating: 6/10

Will I watch it again?  Nope.

Hmmmmm.  Where to start?  Director Bianchi thought it best to begin with a two minute softcore lesbian makeout session and you know what?  He was right.  The music over that (by Nico Cantanese, for his sole feature film) is pretty fucking of-it's-day-Eurosleaze great.  Sadly, that one motif is repeated enough over the first few minutes that you get the idea that he'd run out of ideas.  I counted two themes used in the picture with that first, main one playing 80% over the other one and you hear it A LOT, which got old fast.   The nudity, ahem, thankfully does not tire.

It needs to be said, before you stop reading, that there's a lot of nudity.  It's shocking, I know, because it's an Italian horror movie.  It's a small cast.  There are 3 women and 4 men.  Between this troupe of 7 actors, you get to see 3 different pair of tits (for a total of 6 - count 'em, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 boobs!), 3 glorious Euro bushes and two dicks.  Dicks, you say?  Yes.  More on that in a moment.  When the film needs to move, it does at a reasonable pace.  But there are many scenes that linger for a long, long time and over stay their welcome, and they all revolve around naughty bits.  Now, I know what you're thinking; "Hey, Scorethefilm.  What gives?  Don't you like the sex?".  I do, and thank you for asking.  However when the already overplayed and once memorable theme makes yet another go around AND the sex act feels like it's playing out in real time (because it takes a while) only it goes beyond that, then it's too much.  Sol (Giordano) pleasures herself in bed while the parapalegic, wheelchair bound Ignazio (Gaita) secretly watches on.  You'd think this would last 60 seconds or so but it goes on for a full four minutes.  This is softcore, not porn so no graphic stuff.  This is a frequent thing with this flick.  And then, BAM!  An hour in, someone looks like she's going to go down on Ignazio...

And then she does.  For real.  With hard dick in hand, she does her little mouth dance.  Alright, it seems that we now just went hardcore.  I can dig it.  A couple of minutes in you can tell that she's already at the point in the act that she ready to milk it for all it's worth, so to speak.  So she's fist pounding it like she's in the whack-a-mole finals and occasionally tries to restore life with her tongue, hoping that will light the nerve endings on fire, but that clearly isn't helping.  Look, I've been there.  It's frustrating when you're unable to finish on cue but it's also sad to watch.  She spent 4 full minutes trying to make that happen after she'd given up on the throat bath.  After that, she sets her sights on bangin' Antonio (Sambrell), her husband before she died, but this time, after another overlong speed bag session with his dick and her uvula, they have vaginal sex.  

 Now, you could make the argument that these two hardcore scenes help the story and I would not disagree in this case, but the sheer length of the scenes makes you aware that this is no longer artistic but rather excessive.  But that's just me.  Anyway, back to the movie proper... There's something strange going on that involves Antonio's dead wife from the beginning of the picture.  Is she alive or what?  What's making all this weird shit happen?  As the film goes on you get more and more until you know exactly what the fuck is going on in the last half hour.  Once that happens, bodies start dropping like flies and the kills are fun.   There's a bit of padding in addition to the sex and some of the dialogue exchanges get tedious where a character will repeat the same thought but with different words.  It's not an economic screenplay by a long shot.  Mood is more important.  And it didn't hurt that it was filmed in a castle, giving that Gothic vibe and the widescreen print I watched was dirty which adds to the sleaze factor.  Italian dub with English subs is the way to go.  It's no classic but there's a good movie in here somewhere.  Great fucking posters, right?