Un urlo dalle tenebre

Cries and Shadows, or Exorcist III as it was released in some places (got to love those international copyright laws), is one of the sleaziest Exorcist ripoffs that I have encountered. That is neither an endorsement nor a warning, just a statement.

The plot has a young man finding a strange medallion while on vacation with friends. Because of this medallion, the teen becomes possessed by a succubus (Mimma Biscardi, here often nude). The possessed's acting out is of a sexual nature. The teen as the succubus (whom, strangely, the victims can see) first tries to rape his mother and then his sister, who is a nun. At about the hour mark, Richard Conte shows up as the priest who will carry out the exorcism. And, that is about all there is to the film.

The film's one asset (aside from Mimma Biscardi's bare skin) is the setting. The film takes place in a village built on a hillside. The bourgeoisie family's villa is at the very top. It is a striking location and used well by the filmmakers. The rest of the film is mostly forgettable. I had seen this film once before and had remembered almost nothing except for the setting. As these type of films go, I prefer The Night Child (aka The Cursed Medallion) and The Antichrist (aka The Tempter). Nonetheless, Cries and Shadows does revel unapologetically in its bad taste. Fans of Exorcist ripoffs might be amused.

The infamous Zodiac killer went on record in 1973 in a letter to the San Francisco Police Department where he/she/it stated that "The Exorcist is one of the funniest satirical comedies ever made." I wonder what they would have thought of NAKED EXORCISM, an Italian made clone that stars Eddie Munster as a troubled young man with latent designs on his MILFish hottie mom, a taste for pretty young nuns with nice perky breasts and a penchants for wandering around the house naked.

Made by two directors nobody has ever heard of before and culling many of THE EXORCIST's most infamous moments for effect, the film has retained the ability to amuse for decades beyond the time when William Freidkn's movie lost most of it's ability to shock. Eddie Munster finds an ancient amulet while out wandering through the woods one day with his camera taking pictures of Euro Horror Sex Sluts that aren't really there, and slowly starts to fall under the influence of an ancient Pagan Sex Cult that practiced satanism back in the 15th or 16th century. We see glimpses of their orgies in historical flashbacks that include images of human sacrifice, lesbian sex and idol worship, and wonder where Rob Lowe is in the picture.

Is he crazy or is he possessed? the film wants us to ask ourselves, and then goes out of it's way to show us that Eddie's new fondness for barking out vile obscenities to those who love him is in fact demonic in nature. Meanwhile his attractive late 30/early 40-something mom is starting to wear more revealing nightgowns, the Euro Horror Sex Slut starts to appear nude in Eddie's bedroom, and a hot young nun with a fantastic rack moves into the house to try and curb his growing fondness for wandering around the house naked, either in his own form or that of the nude female succubus which has possessed him. This leads to various sadisto-erotic lesbian encounters with both the nun and mommy, assorted deaths and eventually Eddie is tied to his bed and an Exorcist is called in.

He is played by Richard Conte, a fixture on Italian genre cinema at the time, most notably appearances in Italian Police/Crime thrillers like MILAN CALIBRE NINE, and it is amusing to note that he plays more or less the same character albeit armed with a priest's frock & a bible instead of a small machine gun. The scene where Conte arrives at the airport and ominously stalks into Eddie's house reminded me of a Spaghetti Western when the professional hired gun strolls into town to confront the wicked and dispense justice, but then again I have been on a Spaghetti Western kick and may just be projecting. The main difference is that the bad guys in Westerns never hurl dressers and chairs at their opponents while rocking about in a bed, spewing liquefied cranberry sauce from special effects hoses and made up to look like Marilyn Manson. Eventually the young nun goes all Jason Miller on the succubus, offering herself instead of Eddie for eternal damnation, and with a rack like hers you can't blame the harlot from Hell for taking her up on the offer.

The bottom line here is that demonic possession movies are absurd in the first place, and once you get down to the brass tacks this one is no better or worse than any of the others. If anything you have to admire the Italians who made this for being honest about their intentions to make a skin flick disguised as a horror film rather than allow the polymorphously perverse nature of the genre formula to exist merely as suggestive, shadowy Freudian references involving little girls ... eww. If you can suspend your disbelief and watch the movie drunk it's actually kind of a hoot, with ample nudity, some interesting gore sequences, perverse sexual juxtapositions and a groovy little musical score.

But if you go into this expecting something profound, shocking or revelation-inducing you are wasting your time. This is a horror movie not a documentary on global warming, you don't have to take it seriously and you are allowed to let it turn you on. It is garbage, trash, and knows that about itself. I found the honesty and self-awareness to be quite refreshing, and wonder when it was that nuns stopped being so hot.

4/10

Richard Conte picks up one last easy paycheck before checking out for good in his last film. Conte fans should probably be warned right away that the man himself doesn't show face until one hour and seven minutes into proceedings, but don't write off the film because of that - there's plenty of stupidity here to keep you going before Conte shows up.

Now, this Exorcist rip-off establishes its plot in a series of flashbacks so it takes a bit of patience to figure out why the film has seemingly jumped to the young guy tied to a bed talking like the singer of Cannibal Corpse. All of this seems to involve young Peter being drawn to a medallion lying in a river by a naked redhead that sends him mental and driving away his childhood sweetheart. Peter by the way sports a massive mullet and can act about as well as a discarded sock lying in the central reservation of the M5.

Peter starts acting a bit strange and when the redhead turns up in his room she prompts him to slash her throat, which causes his girlfriend's throat to be cut even though she's miles away in a disco giving it laldy on the dancefloor. This prompts a series of events where Peter himself tries to do away with family members or he turns into the redhead and does the same. This has got something to do with Franco Garofalo holding some sort of orgy years prior to this which is explained by a priest but by this point I was wondering when Richard Conte would show up.

Basically, this film takes scenes from the Exorcist (moving beds, swearing, spewing up, etc etc) and inserts rampant nudity and sleaze in between. At one point Peter even tries to shag his own mum, then his sister! That's the kind of romantic subplot you need in a film like this. It's bizarre how people's opinions differ massively on these Exorcist rip off films - some say this is the worst, but it's far from boring, and yet others say Beyond The Door is most boring, and I thought that one was the best.

This is pure Italian trash by the way so if you don't like that stuff, forget it. Richard Conte's last film too - he had a fatal heart attack the same year this was released.

HBL (and their Pepto Bismol pink logo, which reminded me of 555) released this under the title, The Exorcist III Cries and Shadows, despite the fact that when this film came out in 1975, there had not yet even been an Exorcist II, and with The Exorcist displayed in one font, the Roman numeral III in a different font, and Cries and Shadows in yet another font, with Directed by Elo Pannaccio' directly underneath the title, followed by the cast, "Screenplay by Aldo Crudo, Franco Brocani, Elo Pannaccio' Story by Guido Albonico" - it really took four people to write this Exorcist clone? "First ass~ director: Demetrio Soare" (I presume they meant *assistant*) The final item listed in the opening credits was Elo Pannaccio' s director credit, a second time.

Once the bewildering credits over rain-soaked Rome end, and the incredibly lengthy altar sacrifice/ orgy scene finally end - eight long minutes into the film - the plot is nearly a carbon copy of Wm. Peter Blatty's Exorcist, but with a male lead, as Davy Jones lookalike is possessed by a demon in the form of an attractive nude girl, glimpsed briefly and photographed near a waterfall. When the photos are developed, the girl is not at all visible in them, but Davy Jones begins all the usual behavioral problems Linda Blair did, and after a very long and slowly paced hour, an exorcist, in the form of Richard Conte, turns up to attempt to drive the demon away. Blah, blah blah, blah blah.

This occasionally has the mood and atmospherics of some of Jean Rollin's work, with its intentionally slow pacing, lush colours, abundant female nudity, and surrealist images, but it doesn't help that we are watching a near scene-for- scene ripoff, with nearly X-rated sex and nudity added to an otherwise PG-rated horror, which was released in Greece as Exorkistis No. 2 (Exorcist II) , in the UK, Japan, and Finland as The Exorcist III.

The only credit shown at the end is Directed by Elo Pannaccio', for the third time. He was so proud of this thing that he wanted his director credit listed three times?

This is one of your more blatant Italian "Exorcist" rip-offs. The main difference between this and the original model though (besides the criminally low budget and incompetent film-making) is that the possession here involves an adolescent boy rather than adolescent girl. The devil takes the form of a voluptuously naked, red-headed witch, who the boy first spies while taking pictures of a waterfall. Later when she shows up in his room, he does what any normal teenager would do when confronted by an attractive and willing woman--he tries to strangle her! Then he slashes her throat with a knife which somehow causes his tease of a girlfriend to drop dead miles away where she's frugging to bad music in a disco. Finally, the witch takes control of the boy and uses him to go after his mother and his sister (who's a nun) in quasi-incestuous/quasi-lesbian scenes that only the Italians could (or would) perpetrate. It turns out the witch actually had a relationship way back during the Inquisition with an ancestor/previous incarnation of the sister(they're played by the same actress anyway), and she somehow "impregnated" this ancestor with a devil child, who was spared the latter's burning at the stake. This plot-line is summarily dropped, but it does allow the movie to rip-off Mario Bava's "Black Sunday" as well as "The Exorcist", and even more importantly, it allows for lots of scenes of satanic orgies and that old Italian favorite--hot, naked nun sex!

With the exception of the most famous (and most boring)of them, "Beyond the Door", all of these Italian "Exorcist" knock-offs added a lot of sex into the mix. Some are satanic movies with sex ("The Antichrist", "Damned in Venice", "Ring of Darkness") while others could be better describe as sex movies with a little satanism ("The Eerie Midnight Horror Show", "Malabimba"). This movie is roughly half and half with a lot of nude scenes by the sister, the mother, and obviously the witch. This might keep heterosexual male viewers, at least, from slipping into a boredom-induced coma. The movie really suffers, however, from a lack of name or even recognizable actors. Richard Conte collects an easy paycheck by showing up at the very end as the exorcist. Partizia Gorzi, who plays the sister/nun, was in the giallo "Crazy Desires of a Murderer", and also played another ill-fated woman in Joe D'Amato's sleaze classic "Emanuelle's Revenge".

I'd definitely recommend this to all the Italian devil movie completists out there--but that might be tantamount to recommending it to myself. As for everyone else, uhhh. . .