Las endemoniadas

an above-average mystery/suspense thriller (almost a 'giallo') by Sergio Bergonzelli, with an engrossing story, dubious characters galore (including a main role played by the late Pier Angeli, credited here as Anna Maria Pierangeli), by turns wacky & stylish direction, and a half trippy/half creepy atmosphere about it. kept me guessing almost till the very end, always coming up with a twist, a revelation, or a grabbing visual up it's sleeve (it's even got a scene with WW2-era featuring Nazis!). gotta love a movie that begins with some Freud psycho-babble text, and immediately cuts to a shot of a severed head on a carpeted floor! somebody needs to release this crazy film on DVD pronto (hello Blue Underground, NoShame, Synapse, etc...). anyone with even a passing interest in this kind of film would be well adviced to check out this little known gem.

rating: 8/10

Italian gialli are famous for their ridiculously complicated (and frequently absurd plots)and their "pop", late 60's pseudo-Freudian psychology. This movie though pushes both of these to the most extreme limits. The basic plot here involves a rather dysfunctional family consisting of a trouble woman (Pier Angeli), her governess, and her governess' equally troubled son all of whom may have been involved in the murder/disappearance of the family patriarch. Several different people show up and try to blackmail them for money and sex and wind up being killed in ways that are both gruesome (lots of decapitations)and increasingly ridiculous (there's a rather tasteless subplot involving Nazi gas chambers). The finale involves several sudden twists, each more preposterous than the last. There are several quotes from Freud in intertitles (complete with English-language misspellings) and the usual liberal sprinkling of sexual psychopathology--incest, Elektra and Oedipal complexes, borderline pedophilia, etc. This movie will probably confound newcomers to the giallo film, but people more familiar with the genre will no doubt appreciate it.

Pier Angeli is especially good in a dual role, or actually a triple role considering that she plays one of the characters as both an adult woman and an adolescent girl (the latter no mean feat considering the actress was in her late 30's at the time). Tragically, she would commit suicide not longer after this movie came out. The co-writer Mario Caiano would direct the very similar "Eye in the Labyrinth" and, not surprisingly, some of the other people behind the camera were later involved in the indefensibly trash Italian Nazi sexploitation cycle.

Oh, and by the way, the title "In the Folds of Flesh" actually refers to the folds in the brain, not what some of you dirty-minded folks out there might think.

This is one strange movie - it combines Nazi elements, a police procedural, a giallo, a psychological examining of identity and even comes close to a Last House on the Left vibe.

Severin released this film several years ago, but it's sadly out of print. It's certainly one of the oddest entries in the genre and one you should track down. I've only barely touched on the many twists and turns of the plot because I believe that you should enjoy them for yourself.

This movie is completely over the top! Why and how it escaped getting played around the world, on the midnight circuit, is beyond me. It's like someone made a soup out of a Spanish Soap Opera, a Giallo, Gothic Thriller, and a Film Noir... It's loaded with ridiculous double crosses, kinky incest (is it incest?), countless decapitations, pet vultures, plot twists that make little to no sense, random Freudian Psychology, and extraneous WWII Concentration Camp flashbacks! The score is over-dramatic, as is the acting, and just about everything else. It certainly can't be taken seriously, but that's what's so appealing. Don't be fooled though, if it's the Classic Bava, Martino or Argento-esque formula you're looking for, that's not what you'll get. Despite that it is often listed and cited as a Giallo. This movie came out in 1970, when the genre was just beginning to take root, so while it's certainly got all of the necessary elements to be classified as 'Gialli', the elements are scattered, appearing in different places in the plot than is common to the traditional Giallo formula. That said, it could be of interest to hardcore fans in that respect. That's how I came upon it, and I'm not upset. Think something along the lines of Luciano Ercoli's "Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion" or even Lucio Fulci's "Perversion Story," only much more ridiculous! Wonderfully ridiculous, psychedelic and melodramatic. Wow.

Well there's a homicidal 35 year old woman (I think they're trying to pass her off as 20-something and it really does not work out) and she's completely mentally incompetent. She has an incestuous relationship with her artistic brother, and while the mother looks continually disapproving she just allows all of the murder and mayhem to go on, even bothering to clean up the bodies for her kids. And as I've pointed out, she must have had her daughter when she was 9, because she can't be more than ten years older than the murderous loony in the blonde wig.

There are hints of giallo in the flashbacks and the death of the father at sea, but I do not consider this a giallo at all. It's some weird cult film from the late 1960s that took a bunch of ideas and threw them together in a salad of shame. It kind of reminds me of how The House of Exorcism is an inferior version of Lisa and the Devil. I honestly wish there was a coherent, superior version of In the Folds of the Flesh in the same manner of the ludicrous House of Exorcism, but I guess this is it.