Seven Women for Satan (1976)

Typical mid 70s Euro-sleaze where they tried to work in a horror angle.

Rich guy, total horndog, loves to fantasize about sexual escapades with hot young women. Sometimes those women end up dead, but it’s just a fantasy, a daydream, so no harm no foul, right?

But then it happens once in real life. The attempted sexual assault was definitely not accidental, although the death was accidental. Either way, he knows he’s in deep shit.

He dumps the body and jams over to his castle. Or wait, is it his castle? He mentioned that he just bought a castle. But then when he gets to this castle, there’s an old man on his death bed, rambling on about life and death and the human soul and how he’s pledged his to Satan(?). So I guess he’s the owner? But then, he calls Karl, the butler, his son, not the rich horndog guy who is now a murderer. So does the murderer guy not own the castle? And why does Karl the butler treat him as if he does, if Karl’s father is the one who owns the castle? I’m only 24 minutes into the movie and I’m already confused.

So the movie continues and some more stuff happens, and none of it is any less confusing than the stuff that came before. Who the hell wrote this script or screenplay? Did they have any idea what they were doing?

We get a couple groovy trippy totally unnecessary dance scenes, with boobage, and a scene where a woman tries to have sex with a feather boa, again with boobage. Then we get a new couple who get a grand tour of the torture dungeon. What the hell? Does this movie have anything to do with Satan? Is it supposed to make any sense at all?

Answer, no and no. I think it’s just one of those movies where the audience is expected to be totally stoned and not really care if any of it made sense or not. For us non-stoners, it’s a complete waste of time. I guess, in the end, it’s more of a descent-into-madness thing, but it still doesn’t make any sense at all.

The Urge to Kill aka Attack of the Killer Computer (1989)

So what we have here is a really crappy/campy version of Demon Seed. But, entertaining, and endearing in that super low budget Euro-sleaze b-movie way. Demon Seed is a masterful flick from 1977 about a guy who installs a computer in his house which oversees all the operations of the house and it ends up terrorizing and imprisoning and torturing the people in the house and killing the people who come to the house, etc. Great one. In fact, that is one of the few that I would heartily endorse for a remake, because the technology of computer-controlled-integrated-house has come so far in recent years. Back in the 70s, it was just a wild idea. I betchya somebody could come up with a really insane movie these days.

Anyway, this one is a low budget Italian (edit: British?) ripoff, which is fine. And we get the usual stuff with Italian ripoffs- a whackier, much less plausible story, actors who may or may not have ever stepped on a movie set before, and more emphasis on boobs and cheesy action.

This time it’s a music producer record label guy, who is also a bit of a playboy, who has wired up his entire house with a computer he has dubbed Sexy, which obeys his voice commands or by remote control to do stuff like open doors and play music. Sexy has a bad habit of killing the bimbos/groupies that the guy brings home, though.

Middle part is way too long and slow. Ending doesn’t make sense. Kill scenes are something different than the norm, but still are unimpressive. Lots and lots of boobs in this one. It’s like an Italian Jim Wynorski film.

Hot water fu, tanning bed fu, toothbrush fu, bubble bath fu, Fiat fu, vhs fu.

The Devil’s Honey (1986)

Lucio Fulci’s attempt late in his career to do a Euro-sleaze sex-crime flick. Fulci, as you probably know, tried his hand at a bunch of different genres outside of horror or zombie or gore flicks, with varying degrees of success. Conquest is his sword and sandal flick. Murder Rock is his slasher. The Four of the Apocalypse is his western, New Gladiators aka Warriors of the Year 2072 his post-apocalyptic sci-fi Running Man ripoff (which I just wrote up the other day).

In this one, some chick’s boyfriend is in a motorcycle accident and dies in surgery at the hospital. She blames the doctor for his death, going so far as to call him a murderer. Her strategy to enact revenge is, how do you say? Unorthodox. Unconventional. Psychotic.

The movie is really tedious. It would have been much better with some tighter editing. Some parts drag on and on and on, and then we go to a flashback which drags on and on, and then we get back the main story which drags on and on. The movie is an hour 20 minutes, but it feels like two and a half hours. With some tighter editing, it would have been a better movie at under an hour.

As it is, is it worth watching? No.

Obsession: A Taste for Fear (1988)

Italian sex-crime-thriller, although the sex and nudity far outweigh the crime or any plot. Very much like the Skinemax flicks of this same era. In those, the only reason there was any plot at all was to give the people in the movie an excuse to be on film, and really the only reason they were in the movie was to be naked on film. The plot was always such an afterthought that it was barely part of the movie.

Same deal here. A super gorgeous woman, and very bossy, manages a model agency or advertising agency or something like that. Somebody kills one of her models. If this were a proper movie and not just an excuse to have a bunch of boobs on screen and some lesbo bedroom scenes, there’d be multiple models knocked off. But in this there is just the one, and we spend the rest of the movie trying to figure out whodunnit. A couple more people are killed at the very end, but even those seem like an afterthought. Nothing about the kill scenes are all that graphic.

Everybody with overdubbed American accents. Cheesy synth music, lots of people doing cocaine, high fashion photo shoots, limousines, cigars and champagne. Europeans doing their best to imitate ultra rich Americans. Comes off very Miami Vice-y.

And they really made a super big effort for it to come off as super high tech. High tech by late 1980s standards anyway. Which is cool, but now, of course, it all looks super comical. We’re in a photography studio, and they have lights and video cameras which are hooked up to multiple tvs set up all over the place so they’re all live monitoring the video image. The woman drives some futuristic convertible sportscar straight outta Buck Rogers. In the photo studio, they talk to each other using these little headsets with mics like futuristic walkie talkies. The cop’s gun is a laser gun! Oooooo, lasers! He shoots it only once, but still, laser gun.

Generally a time waster. Pass on it unless you’re a big fan of Euro-sleaze or Skinemax flicks.