Due to my strange, recent infatuation with pretty 70's Italian exploitation actress Leanora Fani, I have now seen a number of pretty good ("Nene") and pretty weird ("Beastialita", "Sensativa") low-budget Italian obscurities featuring this lissome Latin lovely. This movie definitely falls into the latter category, although it's not just "pretty" weird. Maurice Ronet ("The Seduction") is middle-aged guy with a beautiful wife and a young daughter, but he is indebted to his employer, a wealthy industrialist who saved his life during the war. His employer asks him to look after his troubled adult son. The son is definitely troubled--he considers his recently married sister to be a "bourgeois hypocrite" after he apparently follows her to satanic mass/sex orgy one night! He also has a communist girlfriend (Fani), who is apparently hooked on heroin, and gets him tangled up with s creepy drug dealer named "Judas" (who he FIRST met at the aforementioned satanic orgy). Confused yet? Good, because then the whole thing REALLY gets weird.
Euro-beauty Beba Loncar is listed most prominently in the credits, but she has a pretty insubstantial role as Ronet's long-suffering wife. Fani also has a relatively small but very important role (and she gets naked, of course). The two male leads have by far the biggest parts with a memorable turn from the creepy guy who plays "Judas". The visual style owes a lot late 60's/early 70's psychedelic "head" movies--the young protagonist has several very bizarre drugged-induced hallucinations (as typical in these drug movies, the filmmakers seem to have kind of confused addictive drugs like heroin with psychedelic drugs like LSD). The satanic mass may or may not be a hallucination, but regardless it's almost certainly a nod to "The Exorcist" and "Rosemary's Baby". And if there's one thing I enjoy even more than another undraped performance from the luscious La Fani, it's another cut-rate European rip-off of these satanic classics. I wouldn't necessarily recommend this to normal people, of course, but I'm not worried anyone "normal" is ever going to be reading this. . .
The supposed English title of this movie, "Percy is Dead", should make anyone even halfway familiar with Italian smile. There is no one named "Percy" in this movie.
Euro-beauty Beba Loncar is listed most prominently in the credits, but she has a pretty insubstantial role as Ronet's long-suffering wife. Fani also has a relatively small but very important role (and she gets naked, of course). The two male leads have by far the biggest parts with a memorable turn from the creepy guy who plays "Judas". The visual style owes a lot late 60's/early 70's psychedelic "head" movies--the young protagonist has several very bizarre drugged-induced hallucinations (as typical in these drug movies, the filmmakers seem to have kind of confused addictive drugs like heroin with psychedelic drugs like LSD). The satanic mass may or may not be a hallucination, but regardless it's almost certainly a nod to "The Exorcist" and "Rosemary's Baby". And if there's one thing I enjoy even more than another undraped performance from the luscious La Fani, it's another cut-rate European rip-off of these satanic classics. I wouldn't necessarily recommend this to normal people, of course, but I'm not worried anyone "normal" is ever going to be reading this. . .
The supposed English title of this movie, "Percy is Dead", should make anyone even halfway familiar with Italian smile. There is no one named "Percy" in this movie.
