The Doll Of Satan

Giallo Dolly

The Doll Of Satan
aka La bambola di Satana
Italy 1969 Directed by Ferruccio Casapinta
88 Films Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: This one has satanic spoilers.

The Doll Of Satan has kinda been sold, at least in the UK market, as some kind of horror exploitation film but, it really isn’t. It’s a actually a giallo and while certainly not really anywhere near the best of them, it’s actually quite good and doesn’t deserve the reputation it seems to have garnered over the years of being, well, truly terrible. It’s not, actually... it’s good fun. Probably the producers who commissioned the project didn’t think so, since this was director Casapinta’s only film - reports from the on set shenanigans would indicate that he didn’t know what he was doing and, for the most part, his assistant director took over the bulk of those duties on set.

And I’ve seen a fair amount of gialli over the years but this one, a first time watch for me, was certainly a lot more ridiculous than some of the others I’ve seen and, for the genre, that really is saying something. However, there’s a certain quality to it that is almost unique to this film in that it’s almost glossing over it’s own story, in a way. A very simplistic story where leading lady Erna Schurer plays Elisabeth who, accompanied by her fiance Jack (played by Roland Carey... who looks a little like Adam West, it has to be said), pitch up at her uncle’s castle after his death. Once there, various of her uncle’s advisors try and get her to sell the castle.

They do this by bringing a supernatural element into the story by drugging her and making her hallucinate scenes with some kind of phantom and subjecting her to, frankly unrealistic looking tortures in the castle dungeons, which are meant to be ghostly visions of a haunted ancestry come to plague her unless she leaves and sells. So, yeah, the whole horror element in this via the supernatural shilly shallying is actually just man made stuff and, like such gialli as All The Colours Of The Dark or even the opening of Argento’s Deep Red (reviewed here), once shorn of these trapping as the end of the picture, it pulls the film firmly back into the giallo camp, for sure.

Now, there are signs, sadly, that the reports about the incompetence of the director are made good. Some flash cut opening shots are used to illustrate the death of the uncle, presumably to make up for the lack of ample footage and the title sequence is not particularly stunning on this one... like a load of stills which would be used for lobby cards being montaged together in a static manner while the, fairly interesting and driven score plays out over it. There are also some stylistic mis-steps in it too. For instance, when Carol, played by Lucia Bomez, is stripped down to the lingerie, there is a cheesy and constantly repeated howling of a dog in the background, which is almost added as a commentary on Ms Bomez’ sexuality than anything else (it doesn’t help that it’s exactly the same sound sample over and over).

And quite apart from the fairly obvious solution to the story (you will find it hard not to guess the identity of the mystery villain of the piece within the first 20 mins) and it’s clumsy introduction of silly concepts, such as the local artist girl talking into a two way radio fairly early on and signalling to the audience that she’s an under cover cop, not to mention her prowling around the grounds of the castle at night with a geiger counter to tip the audience off that there is, indeed, valuable uranium in them thar hills... there’s also the fact that the story feels kinda jumpy. That is to say, the whole thing feels like its giving us just enough information in each scene to follow through onto the next, as if it’s just giving us the ‘highlights’ version. In fact, it almost felt at times that I was not looking at the film itself but as if somebody had been asked to do one of those photonovel style fumetti magazines of the original product rendered as captioned stills and then somebody had gone and reshot the movie from those to give a condensed, ‘this is all you need to know’ version of the story. So yes, while it does give us the highly stylised trapping of many others in the genre, it also gives us something which feels like the story content is kinda simplistic, stripped down and stylised too. Bizarrely, a few hours after I wrote this note to myself to remind me of this quality to the film, I found that the lead actress was well known as at the time for appearing in those very same photo magazines such as Killing (aka Kilink aka Satanik).

That being said... the film is very colourful in the costumes, lighting and decor (there are some spectacular coloured filter shots of the night sky scattered throughout the picture). And, whether you accept that certain scenes were shot with the input of the director or not, there are some striking compositional moments in the movie too. For instance, there’s a moment when Elisabeth and Jack go for a walk in the castle grounds at night. This starts off with a static shot which almost resembles a double gate fold LP or flyer. The opening shot features the thin, visible vertical strips of the wall at either side of a vertical slatted iron gate (so many verticals thrown onto the screen all at once). The gates slightly ajar so the two sets of gate verticals open onto a fifth sliver of a vertical in which two characters can be seen walking away from the camera in roughly the centre of the shot. Which looked great. There’s also a scene where Carol is seen pacing through the top two of the quarter quadrants of her bedroom window from outside. The camera tracking her in close up as she paces from one quarter to the other. It’s all quite interesting.

Nevertheless, the pared down, almost pop art story elements don’t hide the mystery from many a viewer, I should imagine. It even ends with a Scooby Doo-like unmasking, revealing the face you absolutely know is going to be there, along with the movie equivalent of the ‘Why, if it isn’t Mr...!’exclamation in said scene. So, accidental or not, in its execution it is at least consistent and honest in its approach.

Although I really enjoyed the soundtrack by Franco Potenza (alas, sadly still unavailable on CD) it really got on my nerves in a couple of scenes where drops of a drug are dripped into a drink and the music renders a small musical sting as each drop is released. Honestly, this really gives the technique of Mickey Mousing a bad name... if the technique wasn’t tarnished enough through over use over the years already. And talking about those dripping drugs, when Elisabeth accidentally drops her drink and smashes it, the story is fractured enough that the lack of drugs in her system do not stop her from decoding her nightly, traumatic, pseudo-supernatural (pseudo-natural?) visitations as anything which belongs to the realm of the living. Which is strange but I suspect, by this point, the editor was just assembling what he could to make some kind of sense of the master footage.

And yeah, I’ve probably said enough but, I have to admit, I really enjoyed the ‘leave your brain at the door, you won’t need it’ sensibilities of The Doll Of Satan and I suspect die hard giallo fans will not find it unrewarding. I’d certainly watch it again and think it would be a perfect movie to put on as a midway point in an all nighter screening of films from the genre, for sure. Glad they finally issued this one.