SATAN'S BABY DOLL

CONTAINS SPOILERS AND OH NO NOT AGAIN; YES, THEY'RE VERY NICE, BUT CAN YOU PLEASE PUT SOME CLOTHES ON NOW?

Listen: I'm not a perv. I like the nude female form as much as the next guy (with a couple of exceptions depending on who the next guy actually is) but I'm not obsessed with it, and there comes a point when you just want to be shown something else. You can have too much of a good thing. It's purely coincidence that they sent me the glaucoma-porn Bilitis (barely legal skeletons disrobing in aesthetically pleasant lighting) on the same day as this Italian sleaze offering from 1982, in which the women have at least had a good meal recently.

For the first ten minutes or so of Satan's Baby Doll, nothing happens. A woman has died and members of her family stand around staring at her and each other. It's obvious there's something not quite right here. Next thing you know, the live-in nun is masturbating for the benefit of the peeping tom paraplegic brother, and the cute daughter appears to be possessed, and is going around seducing and killing everyone for revenge, including the family doctor who's supplying morphine on the side, and a gibbering maniac who's sacrificing chickens in a cellar to save the girl's soul.

Matters aren't helped by the shoehorning in of spicy XXX-rated footage from a very battered print of low definition - significantly worse quality than the rest of the film. These scenes are mainly extended blurred close-ups of pudenda and lesbian writhing and add nothing but a few minutes of running time (which is less than an hour and a quarter even with this extra hot material).

I'd be lying if I said I hated Satan's Baby Doll (incldentally, Satan doesn't appear in the movie and only gets a couple of mentions in dialogue near the start). It's sleazy and exploitative rubbish, clearly, and far too reliant on the female characters getting them out, but when it's not pandering to the dirty raincoat audience it has a nice mood and look to it, and a halfway decent story of vengeance from beyond the grave (well, it would be the grave if she were actually buried, but she's just been left on a slab in the cellar along with several other mummified corpses). I think it's really one for the more devoted sleaze connoisseurs; it's not without interest but it's not really my cup of filth. Might be worth tracking down Malabimba, the 1979 film of which it's a semi-remake, though.

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