Black Magic Rites (1973)

People are voting emotionally.

As Good As It Gets

Blistering performances.

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

Jack Nelson (Mickey Hargitay) arrives a gloomy looking castle with his fiancé Laureen (Rita Calderoni) and strange things start to happen immediately. Why? The hell if I know but it is somehow related to Laureen being the reincarnation of Isabella, a witch who was staked and burned alive 500 years ago. Oh, and there are some vampires wandering around too. This is my second Renato Polselli flick (after the previous year's DELIRIUM, also with Hargitay) and I'm not quite sure what to make of it. It is great in spots (moody lighting and an interesting editing technique) and completely lousy in others (totally fake rubber bats and easily exposed black backdrops outside of set windows). The biggest problem is it runs way too long (1 hour and 49 minutes) and doesn't make a lick of sense. Worth seeing once just for the 70s feel and the abundance of nudity.

I won't bother regurgitating the plot, because the movie didn't seriously try to have one. It had an idea for a plot, but... well, read the other reviews in the comment section.This is going to be an analogy of how not good REINCARNATION OF ISABEL played.It was as if... the producers had arranged a train wreck killing the entire cast and crew (including Renato Polselli) on their way home from location to collect on a life insurance scam. The wreck also destroyed all copies of the finished script but spared 90% of the exposed negatives. Not satisfied with just the insurance money, the producers then hired an undergrad film student to edit the footage into a releasable film by the end of spring break. With neither a script nor a budget, the student calls his girlfriend at the college radio station to borrow a few albums nobody at the station will notice missing and then join him at the editing studio. The two then spend the next week cutting the film and dubbing in the music and dialogue by themselves. Finishing just in time, they suddenly realize that one missing can of film rolled behind the refrigerator and was ruined before they could make use of it.Thus, we are left with a finished product that is haphazardly structured, inappropriately scored, and buffoonishly scripted. We have a scene in which a doctor character is molesting his patient in one room while simultaneously applying a vampire bite to a different woman in a completely different room. SIMULTANEOUSLY, dude! We have a virgin-raping 3-way scored to ragtime harpsichord. We get a Donald Pleasance impersonator thrown into a snake-pit with only TWO snakes in it and one is already DEAD. Even at the denouement when Laureen runs down the stairs, she's barefoot, but once outside she's wearing bedroom slippers. WTF, was she keeping them by the front door?

This is one of the worst films I've seen, unlike much of the Italian sleaze/giallo genre. The actors do not know how to act, editor was on permanent leave, beautiful landscapes only make its hollowness more apparent. Avoid it, there's nothing to enjoy. Even the blood looks more artificial than cranberry sauce.

This movie makes no sense (like most Italian horror films I've seen), but has enough sleazy nudity, blood and weirdness going on that it doesn't really matter. What made the film work for me was the haunting, erotic soundtrack! I liked this about as much as the similarly ridiculous NUDE FOR SATAN (also from Redemption/Image). Worth a rental if you enjoy this type of nonsense, but I can't see anyone buying the disk and watching it more than once.