Le regine

It coud have been a good short film, or an acceptable medium-length film, but it is one of the most boring movies I've ever seen. Nothing happens in the movie before the last 7 minutes. There is no plot, no tension, no pace, no mood, it is not haunting, or trippy, or visually mesmerezing, or atmospheric. Nothing at all. And I am really into slow and long movies. I love low budget movies from the 70s, but I can not positively value a movie for having only a good final seven minutes.

Dippy hippy David is travelling freely through somewhere or other on his motorbike, feeling the wind in his hair and superiority on his ego. He lives free, is not faithful to any woman because 'that would make him unfaithful to all the other women', you know, all that crap. I suppose I'll give him credit for stopping to help a sinister old man who's got a flat tyre, but let's face it: the guy's a sponger. That's what this film is – a parable on what happens when you're a want your money for nothing and your chicks for free.

After David somehow manages to kill this old guy in a car crash, he hides out in a shed for a while, until he discovers that the house next to the shed is inhabited by three ladies. There's Samantha (dirty-looking, too skinny) Bibiana (grumpy, too skinny) and Liv (Naïve, another dippy hippy) who invite him in for breakfast – gigantic cakes! Wait – those cakes stand for symbolism! That means that the other bit where they give him an apple to eat...

It might be a good time to describe the interior of this house too – the living room is filled with hundreds of cushions, some fake trees, and three gigantic pictures of the chicks on the back wall. Their rooms also have a huge picture and a velvet covered bed each and their kitchen is a bizarre angular nightmare made up fifty-thousand shelves and dookits. This is useful information I'm giving you here, as usual.

There's something about the way these girls can teleport about the place and perform satanic ceremonies that Raymond just doesn't like, but he's gets to bang all three of them so what does he care? They all keep going on about some castle where some strange guy lives and how Raymond got to meet this guy who the girls have a secret meeting with, and so on and so forth until the ending that completely shifts the tone of the film.

What makes it so bizarrely watchable is that these three girls seem to have limitless supply of long flowing gowns of many colours, mental make up and crazy wigs, and throughout the film the wigs get bigger and more insane. There's also a really huge arty streak throughout this one, from the twitchy editing to the bizarre sequences where Ida Galli has some sort of weird dragon painted on one boob, to the hellish soundtrack of Ray Lovelock singing some song about how this and that is 'gonna get ya'.

In the wake of a road accident, a young drifter on motorbike is lured to his unforeseen fate at the hands of three stunning sisters, residing in an incommunicado deep-woods cabin(with interior furnishings that look like they were lifted from the sets of A CLOCKWORK ORANGE).

LE REGINE is a more-than-partially successful merging of pop-artsy midcentury modernism with fairly routine erotic eurohorror. A variably intriguing mood piece with a retro-cool music score by Angelo Francesco Lavagnino(a soundtrack LP was released), it's thick with a phantasmagorical atmosphere, both sinister and celestial. The highly attractive primary castmembers vitalize their characters with moxie, especially during the intermittent soft-erotic scenes(which are to the libido as the spur is to the bronco).

Le REGINE maintains a slow but steady pace, and remains interesting and consistently watchable straight through to the alarming and entirely out-of-nowhere final curtain. While it's certainly not a perfect picture, this largely overlooked oddity warrants reassessment, and probably deserves a few long-withheld acknowledgements...it's a notch or two above the standard for sexy 70s Eurotrash, and just that little bit out of the ordinary.

7/10...a nice surprise.

This rare French-Italian coproduction tells the story of David (Ray Lovelock), a young hippie, who meets three mysterious, but beautiful young women in the woods by a lake. They take him under their spell, and when he finds out, it's too late.

Tonino Cervi's film is an atmospheric horror movie with erotic moments and some psychedelic sequences. Ray Lovelock boosts one of his earliest sympathetic performances in an Italian genre film, and the three seductive women of evil, among them Ewelyn (Ida Galli) Stewart, are convincing as well. Too bad that the movie has an awfully long time to take off, the first part gets boring as it proceeds. But the second part repays well, especially the final 20 minutes that culminate in a really harrowing climax that should satisfy every horror buff. Rating: 6 out of 10.

By the way: Ray Lovelock also features as composer and performer of the film's two songs, which are quite nice to listen to.

Queens of Evil is a completely obscure Eurotrash flick, and that's not surprising at all as this film has zero mass market appeal and will appeal only to fans to obscure cult cinema - and even then, not all fans. Queens of Evil is a simply bizarre movie and I really don't know what the point of it is. It can't really be pigeon holed into any of the main genres of Italian cinema - it would probably fall somewhere between a sex flick, an exploitation film and a cult themed Giallo (a la All the Colours of the Dark) - but even that definition doesn't really fit it. Our main character is David - a hippy travelling aimlessly on his motorcycle. After a strange encounter with a man who needs his tire changing, David rides on and soon comes across an apparently deserted house. He decides to spend the night in the shed and is surprised the next morning to be awoken by a beautiful young woman named Liv. Liv seems keen to get rid of David, but after her sisters catch sight of him; they ask him to stay and David soon discovers that he has bitten off more than he can chew...

The atmosphere is the key thing about this film. Director Tonino Cervi handles the film well and ensures that it's always mysterious. The locations used make the film feel isolated and claustrophobic and this adds well to the atmosphere. The film boasts a good cast, with the handsome Ray Lovelock fitting into the lead role well and convincing as a hippy. You'd expect some nice female talent too considering the plot here, and the film doesn't disappoint. All three of the leading ladies (Evelyn Stewart, Silvia Monti and Haydée Politoff) provide nice eye candy and also manage to create a foreboding chemistry between themselves and Ray Lovelock. The film is very slow to start and not a lot happens for the first hour or so; but to be honest, I preferred this part of the film to the build up to the climax. Considering how slow the first two thirds are, you would think that the film would kind of explode at the end, and while we do get something of a twist; the ending actually isn't all that interesting and doesn't make a lot of sense. Overall, this is an interesting mood piece and I did enjoy it, but I'm not sure why and I wouldn't recommend it.