⭐️⭐️1/2
Psychic weenie Dr. Werner Vogler, arrives at the ancestral castle of the wheelchair-bound crab-ass Mrs. Rezzori (the fucking awesome Brigitte Christensen) to use his healing tai chi on her broken body. The handsome young doctor is warned by a sleazy homeless drunk that the castle is haunted before he even makes it through the gate. But Vogler is a man of science… well, pseudoscience and experiences a flash of a bloody knife as he reads the castle. Uh oh. Looks like that homeless drunk who was really into close talking may not be as loony as he looks. The lady of the house has sexy relations with the maid (don’t blame her) and Dr. Vogler has sexy (if you can call it that… more on this later) times with Rezzori’s granddaughter (who kind of looks like Virginia Madison and David Bowie had an offspring who was somehow not sexy). There’s also a journalist hanging around who gets excited to talk to the parapsychologist. Mrs. Rezzori gets upset when her journalist friend and the young doctor talk about ghosts and, like the adult she is, smashes her teacup on the floor, ordering her maid to kneel and clean it up. She also calls her a whore. These Italians… I swear. Sinister glarings from the lady of the house and foreboding synth notes let us know bad times are ahead… the film title was also a giveaway. Healing Reiki happens to sexy butt-jazz (if this were an 80s action flick we’d see the hero’s thrusting buttcheeks lit only by moonlight but this is an 80s Italian horror flick produced for television by Lucio Fulci so we just get our hero performing topless tai chi in the mirror to vaguely racist electronic music) and the maid shares some spooky gossip (lots of suspicious deaths tied to the castle) with the young doctor. He continues to have nightmares of a brutal stabbing, a creepy doll that likes to boogie pops up, a priest with an impressive head of hair looks out of place in the crumbly Italian countryside, folks begin to die and a very moist corpse in a wheelchair harbingers death… and then murders too! So it’s a lot like any Italian vacation I’ve ever taken. There’s a whole lotta drag provided by the not-so-entertaining close-up shots of unnecessary things and a focus on plot threads that are as awkwardly presented as they are handled but there’s also a whole lotta drag that works as braindead entertainment (an extended scene on horses set to lame-ass western music, a spying woman who is definitely an authentic Italian grandma, a drunk homeless man yelling at a storm). Then, there’s the sex scene between the doctor and the granddaughter that just defies any known form of human arousal. In a sudden cut we jump to Dr. Vogler (looking like a bottom in a German gay porno) pouring liters of runny yogurt (heavy cream?) all over his lover, scooping it into her mouth and drizzling it over her lips like some sort of horrendous fuck party between two drugged-up homely prostitutes for the benefit of the dairy farmers of America. We get close ups of the doctor’s very pleased face as this poor woman is drowned in white fluid that looks like it’s been left out on the counter just a bit too long. It’s not just gross, it’s upsetting… and I don’t often get upset. The movie has its fun (moist wheelchair skeleton), wretched (dairy sex), creepy (Dr. Vogler), wonderful (Brigitte Christensen and genre staple Paul Muller) and boring (also Dr. Vogler) bits and it all paints a pretty standard portrait of Italian TV horror from the era. The junky splatter is fine and was reused for Fulci’s A Cat in the Brain while the rest of the movie slipped into obscurity. It’s entertaining enough to give a glance if you like you films to not make much sense but don’t go out of your way to get your hands on it. And put down that damn milk!
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