Maurizio, a young man from the World Research Organization has spent the last 78 days breaking the record for the longest time underground. He’s about to be pulled up within the hour when he has some unsettling visions of a religious manner. The team monitoring him loses visual contact with him and they receive a frantic phone call from the man, screaming about how “they’re coming for me!” His colleagues decide they have to get their asses down there and rescue the poor bastard. They’re joined by an archivist from the University of Florence and her dink of an associate because she happens to have some maps of the underground tunnels connecting the researchers’ home for the last few months to an abandoned abbey where some bad shit went down. They don’t find him when they get to his makeshift home but they do find some fresh blood, which gets them worrying. The archivist wanders off and finds a burial site while the group splits into two to search the tunnels for their missing man and the now vanished girl. She uncovers the history of the place involving seven monks who were found guilty of witchcraft during the inquisition and came to the usual tortuous end a pact with the devil warranted during that time. Of course there’s a prophecy where the dead monks will return in 700 years to spill the blood of seven heretics. Talk about bad timing. Folks start dropping and they find it impossible to leave thanks to a combination of falling rocks and hellfire. Spears, daggers, an executioner’s ax and spiders are used to do away with the cast. If your idea of a good time is watching a group of idiots run around a cave, being stalked by murderous ghost monks (and if not, what the fuck?) then this late eighties spaghetti nightmare from Umberto Lenzi should hit the spot. Sure, it drags in more than one place but like most of Italy’s late 80s output, somehow it still manages to make me smile.
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