Challenge The Devil

Deviling Up

Challenge The Devil
aka Katarsis
Italy 1963
Directed by Giuseppe Veggezzi   
Severin Films Blue Ray Zone A/B
From The Eurocrypt Of
Christopher Lee Volume 1

Okay, so... this is going to be a hard one to write up. 

Challenge The Devil is the second film presented in Severin’s first, wonderful The Eurocrypt Of Christopher Lee Blu Ray boxed set and, although the film clocks in at only 79 minutes, it honestly felt like maybe 4 hours. I mean, this was a hard one to watch and I’m used to some of the slower and less comprehensible European gothic pieces from this era (and a couple of the ones I’m thinking of are in this boxed edition, as it happens). I’m not 100% sure how to approach writing this one so I’m just going to throw the meagre plot in, such as it is... and then relate the behind the scenes story of how the movie came to be transformed from being what was probably a bit of a mess to being, frankly, even more of a mess.

Okay, so the film starts off well enough with some interesting cinematography where, whoever is behind this part of the film, is using strong architectural lines to pull the eye into the shot rather well. And it does well to detract from the sparse plot, where a man who is deemed to be a black mailer is shot by two thugs, escaping into a church with his wounds to find a priest, Father Guardiano, played by Ulderico Sciaretta. There’s a pretty nice shot in amongst these scenes where the man is lying in bed reflected in a mirror, with Guardiano looking down to the mirror and talking to him. These clever shot choices do not remain in the movie for long, however... 

The man explains his blackmail material has been stolen by his gal for more nefarious purposes so, after patching him up, Guardiano goes to find the lady at a night club and explain why she should return the materials. So then we are in the nightclub and we then see no less than three acts play out, more or less in their entirety, stopping the film dead, each of which having pretty much nothing to do with the story in any way, shape or form. These include “Argentinian singing sensation Sonia” who is clearly miming along to a dubbed recording of one of her, presumably ‘hit’, records. Either that or the small band accompanying her on stage have hidden the female backing vocal group in the toilets of this small venue and maybe left the door open.

Then Guardiano finds the girl and relates his back story of how he came to be a priest. And at this point, he tells of the time he was an animalistic hooligan in a gang who got trapped in a castle where the devil, a relatively brief appearance by Christopher Lee, challenged them with the task of finding a lady in the castle before sunrise. The rest of the film is a flashback of this as they stumble around to imagined... or at least far from convincing... dangers and then escape in the end to lead better lives. We then return briefly as the girl hands the papers over, moved by Guardiano’s truly boring story, to do the right thing. What the heck?

Okay, as soon as we entered the flashback stage, my Al Adamson style patch job radar instinct kicked in. This was either two films spliced together or, more likely (as turned out to be the case), somebody trying to rescue the shoddy original movie and make it more commercially viable (and failing quite badly at it, I have to say). 

It turns out (in one of Severin’s thorough extras) that director Veggezzi was trying to break into the movie business. This was his only film and he gave up after his experiences with this. He shot a ninety minute movie full of careful consideration to body language and the movements of people but with a lot of improvisation. This shows in the final product, as there’s not much dialogue, the actors all move in heightened and bizarrely over the top ways (this is a movie which is totally over acted but, honestly, after hearing about the creation of the film, I can’t blame the actors for doing what they were told) and often look, at times, like they are trying to figure out just what to do with themselves in some of the scenes. 

Okay so... even on the first shoot, Veggezzi apparently didn’t do all of it himself. After one of the actresses rejected his romantic advances, the director responded by trying to kill himself, throwing himself out of a hotel window.... although he survived (he couldn’t even do that right, I guess) and spent some time recovering. Then the small production company bankrolling the film went under. The film was sold to another company and Veggezzi did not have access to it anymore. The other company retained one of the actors (Ulderico Sciaretta) then added the completely tonally different, framing ‘story’ and tried to release it like that. I don’t think the film was a success. 

The director, embittered by his experience, turned his back on the world of film, joined a kind of super communist party, cut down a sacred tree on a pilgrimage site with his drunken friends one night (yeah, they got the wrong tree)... and then lived out his days writing poetry, being ultra political and making some... not too impressive, I have to say... sculptures. He then got killed when he was hit by a car in his town one night, decades later. 

I never heard of him before but he managed to make a really dull film, I would say. Berto Pisano’s replacement score is interesting sometimes but, often not sitting well with some of the visuals, I’d have to say (at times it sounds like a kind of bastard love child of Italian jazz and Dave Brubeck’s Take Five, playing through a scene with no consideration for what is actually going on and destroying the atmosphere). Some of the ‘fish out of water’ actors in this are kinda interesting at times, such as the constantly laughing George Ardisson but, yeah, that’s about it. All in all I’m glad I saw this one and am grateful that Severin have managed to restore it for their Blu Ray set. Whether it was worth doing is arguable but I’m sure it must have its fans somewhere. I wouldn’t count myself as one of them and I think I would mostly warn people off of this one... I certainly wouldn’t recommend it anyone I know.