Trauma de una adolescente

It seems after the success of the fine thriller "La Orca" director Eriprando Visconti saw a way to make some more money, by continuing a story that should have ended with the first film. The young girl, released from her captivity, returns home to pout and scream and have numerous "flashbacks" which materialize in endless clips from the first movie. "Oedipus Orca" immediately dissolves into a turgid soap opera, when the girl embarks on a quest to find out if an old family friend had an affair with her mother years ago, and as a result could be her real father. Rather than following a more interesting story about the girl and her anger at her stepfather for not paying her ransom in the first film, we get a lot of nudity. And badly filmed sex scenes. This film is pointless in every way, and the director must have realised this, as he decided to stick in completely repulsive footage of cattle being shot in the head, gutted and skinned and decapitated on camera, in a scene that seems to go on forever. A scene that has absolutely nothing to do with the story at all. The tasteless scene only exposes the film for the garbage that it really is. It is hard to believe after seeing this one that director Eriprando Visconti is the nephew of Luchino Visconti, a man known for beautiful and tasteful art-house films. The original film "La Orca" is a very good film, but this sequel is so bad that it almost hurts the original. I wish I never saw this garbage.

This is an unusual Italian movie in that it is a sequel to "La Orca", a film made only one year earlier (Italy in the 70's was infamous for cheap rip-offs, but not really for sequels). "La Orca" was a rather notorious film about a spoiled teenage girl (Rena Neihaus) who is kidnapped and has to use her sexual wiles to survive. This movie picks up right afterwards when she is taken back to her family and boyfriend. Her family is a little odd. Both her mother and father come in the bathroom, for instance, while she's in the tub after her ordeal (or maybe that was a normal thing to do in 1970's bourgeois Italy?). Her boyfriend insists on feeling her up on their first date after the incident, which triggers a sexual flashback from the first movie. But she is herself is obviously disturbed--she gets her boyfriend to take her back to the shack in which she was held in the previous film where, unable to persuade him to have sex, she masturbates (and further pads the running time with more flashbacks from the first movie).

The film then takes another strange turn when her parents take her out to their country estate. There she tries to seduce an old family friend (played by the director himself) after she finds out he and her mother were lovers many years back (you can probably see where THIS might very well go). There is some strange and seemingly gratuitous footage of a slaughterhouse floor, perhaps in a bid to make this as sleazy and notorious as its predecessor. It doesn't quite work though. The end is kind of shocking, but nearly as shocking--or effective--as it could be.

The German former Playboy Playmate Neihaus gives a very decent performance (and she takes her clothes off frequently both in the new scenes and the flashbacks). The other performances are also pretty good, and the film is generally well made, but the story just isn't nearly as compelling as in the previous film. (It actually reminded me of the Ornella Muti-Eleanora Giorgi film "Appassionata", which also featured actor Gabriele Frezetti in the father role, more than the original "La Orca", but it wasn't as good as that one either). It is kind of interesting--and worth seeing I guess--but certainly not as good as the first film.