Thomas... ...gli indemoniati (1970) Poster

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5/10
Arthouse with the laughing windows
Bezenby3 March 2019
Strange arthouse film labelled as a horror to lure House with the Laughing Windows fans like me into a false sense of security. There is the odd creepy moment in this one, but what the film is all about is something else entirely. Someone ask Pupi Avati because I don't have a clue, although I did get a huge Federico Fellini vibe from it all.

Further muddying the waters is my basic command of Italian and the visual quality of the version I watched being akin to that of an eighteenth generation VHS of a porn film and you get the idea that the odds were not in the film's favour. With that, let's move on to what it may or may not have been about.

A group of actors and one writer are currently working on their newest play, which seems to be about one of the actresses involved and her child Thomas. Meanwhile a man wanders about a cemetary talking about the same thing, before suggesting to the actors that they hold a séance. After speaking in a child's voice, a child called Thomas does appear to the actors, who then take him to their next destination.

Among them they agree to let Thomas himself decide whom he spends the rest of his life with, as the actors confront their own anxieties, and an old (sometimes young!) man kind of stalks them throughout the film. That's about all I can tell you about the plot, which may or may not have happened at all, seeing that the ending doesn't make any sense either.

There's an avalanche of surreal visual material throughout the film, as the script writer digs up stone bust in front of a ruined castle and babbles about the voices in his head. An old lady is led through a hotel where old crones, labelled either alive or dead, lie in beds around them. Someone orders an ice cream and the waiter runs up hundreds of stairs to serve it. Actors walk seamlessly from a stage to the middle of a wood. You can see why even with an HD copy and full subtitles, things wouldn't be any easier to figure out.

This isn't my kind of thing at all to be honest.

Mariangela Melato has the biggest eyes I've ever seen on a person.
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6/10
Thomas and the Bewitched
BandSAboutMovies14 December 2023
Warning: Spoilers
Thomas the Possessed (or Thomas and the Bewitched, I have seen both translations) is from director Pupi Averti, who wrote it with his brother Antonio and Giorgio Celli. It was his second film, one he said that was cursed by family issues and money issues.

A new theater company - Edmund Purdom is one of the actors - is about to put on its first performance, the story of a child named Thomas who a woman believes that she has given birth to but who does not exist. They're met by a man who offers to read the fortune of the play. At that seance, they are introduced to Thomas, who has become a real person.

On the way to the town where they will perform, they meet an actor hanging from a tree who claims to be the only survivor of a performance gone wrong, one that ended with the audience murdering all of the actors except for him. This must have happened, as the audience is already attacking the stage before the first scene. This is after they rode a ghost train to the town, so at this point, anything could happen.

From a cemetery with bottles instead of graves, the sexual revolution and a hospice home where the elderly die rapidly, Thomas the Possessed is one strange movie, yet we should accept no less from its director. If it all ends where it begins, we must accept this.

After this failed to find an audience, it would take Averti five years to make his next film, La mazurka del barone, della santa e del fico fiorone. A year later, he would make Bordella and the movie he may be best known for, The House With the Laughing Windows. He's still directing movies today.

For some time, the only way to see this was to rent the copy in the Bologna library, which Averti himself donated. Its production company went out of business and the movie had only played the 1970 film festival in Locarno.
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