Nude for Satan (1974)

 

Director: Luigi Batzella

Screenplay: Luigi Batzella

Cast: Rita Calderoni as Susan / Evelyn; Stelio Candelli as Dr. William / Peter; James Harris as The Devil; Renato Lupi as the Butler; Iolanda Mascitti as the Servant Girl

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) / An Abstract Film Candidate

 

Oh darling, what is a memory?

From that title, and the first shot of the version I saw, of an actress skipping through misty dark woodlands barely wearing a lace see-through dressing gown, we know what to expect...at least we presume to. As an erotic Italian horror film Nude for Satan in its softcore version would be too weird and esoteric for the dirty mack brigade. Even in knowledge a hardcore version exists, there is a prevailing sense here that version, as here, would still be an odd duck with what exactly is on its mind.

With the music over the opening credits by Alberto Baldan Bembo a woozy, compelling series of drones, synths and what are apparently bongos, Nude for Satan is a curious one to actually watch. Let us be frank, it is a lackadaisical film with one foot between its weird esoteric dialogue (least for the English dub), its lack of a cohesive in-depth plot, and still trying to be erotica in what is a story structure whose languid leanings undercut the sensuality. A male doctor named William (Stelio Candelli) is driving his white Beetle bug car in a night storm to a patient, only to drive past a car accident with a woman named Susan (Rita Calderoni) inside unconscious. Going to a nearby location, a gothic castle, looking for help, he is immediately sucked into a phantom world outside time which Susan will join him within separately. The castle the moment you step into it is immediately out of reality, where doppelgangers of the other person, in whimsical sex obsessed forms, dressed in gothic melodrama costumes, try to seduce the other, and with an occult eroticism around the frames.

Truthfully, in respect to the fun of Nude for Satan, in a more cohesive form, with focus or even a more overtly experimental form, this premise would have the tone of avant-garde jazz in playing to scenes out of context, mood scenes for the sake of mood. Using its mix of a really cool gothic manor and being brazenly titillating to win the viewer over, there would have been a film more ambitious than what we got with more careful construction to its form. Nude for Satan is sillier than this, from the director of the infamous Video Nasty The Beast in Heat (1977), and it is none of the above, closer instead to a half sketched out Jess Franco film, which may be seen as a damning comment as, even as a fan of Franco, I am fully aware the cult Spanish film maker made films himself that felt like they were mere fragments of a premise themselves. Instead, for those who can appreciate this film as I did, it feels like a half awake fantasy. Not even an erotic one as the sexuality can be justified as being the kind of eyebrow rolling heterosexual male gaze, prurient and conservative in form, which is the most boring kind, not the kind you would get from a Jess Franco which progresses into something more interesting and subversive. What little you get feels more part of its weird fever dreams than playing to sexual freedom, and even the message would be confusing if you attempted to think about it. It does have Satan involved, and plays to the idea of sexuality being dangerous and evil, despite wanting as much female nudity onscreen as possible, thus becoming something prurient without a subversive edge to it, only with the context of anything remotely erotic here being more appropriate “off” tonally as everything else is.

I have to still credit what is a trashy film, in terms of how really unfocused it feels, for having to courage to be this weird, a phantasmagoric soft/hardcore gothic film with some production value and where the doppelgangers talk like figures in a bizarre philosophical discussion on reality. Let us be honest even further than I have gone, you would not get a film like this even in the eighties, something very of the time in how minimal this is even in terms of an exploitation film which barely has a plot at all on its shoulders. Even if someone had made a film like this later, there is something about this time where the money existed for these European genre films, where the location shooting was affordable and not shot in apartments, and the style still there even in this obscurer work to make what thin premise there is here have a compelling mood.

The plot really is not a great deal, as it is a series of scenes, where our leads find themselves entangled in a prolonged scenario in this world of strange grinning older men, seductive female servants, and male and female doppelgangers who are proudly (gloriously) camp in their proclamations of love to the opposite sex. It is a languid oddity with hindsight before you have to explain, or witness watching the moment, when the giant spider inexplicably appears. It is a very fake but thankfully homemade one which that is a cross between a raisin and a tick in form, appearing in a scene to torment the female lead in its web, never explained nor appearing again in context. The fact there are multiple cuts means that, for the softcore version I saw, it may lack a lot of its more openly lurid for exploitation content, instead becoming a far more heady haze dream. It lacks eroticism in terms of openly being sensual, more an experience between worlds where the final orgiastic scene is less sexual than performance art dancing involving a woman with the most openly revealed ribcage possible in cinema. It is a film that, to anyone not used to the way some cult films can be less about cohesion, would be easy to despise. It absolutely is not a film you could present to someone not used to these films, but to those who are firmly comfortable in exploring these curiosities, Nude for Satan is the ambient music album of gothic erotic Italian cinema, for good and for bad.

Abstract Spectrum: Hazy / Minimalist

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Low