...hanno cambiato faccia

Vampires are the real BAD guys (i.e. corporate honchos feeding on much more than blood) in this satirical, quirky outing. Visually stunning, with a main character who goes by the name of Giovanni Nosferatu... not to forget an army of white, man-eating utility cars from hell (just forget wimpy, musty ole bats!)... I mean, how can you go wrong?

Italian jazz, Italian car factories and an invitation to meet the boss. That juxtaposition of the naked woman in the fur coat and the lifeless village. All surface style in the villa, executive toys clacking away. Great first appearance (complete with choir!) of Celli. The offer is made; there's a room full of ickle babies and a troupe of white fiats. It's a fascinating little flick. The allegory may be a bit heavy handed, but there's a real style here.

When searching for ways to describe "They've Changed Faces", I can only come up with opposites and contradictions. It's obscure and little known, but simultaneously it might be the most original and unique film ever to come out of Italy. I wouldn't label it as a horror film, and yet it features some of the most atmospheric and unsettling moments you'll ever witness. The plot and the characters are extremely weird and overall impossible to sympathize with, but the film is fascinating from start to finish and you do develop care for everyone. The whole thing is senseless and basically just a bunch of nonsense, however a lot of thought went into the script and it's full of clever and downright intelligent metaphors. And so on.

Alberto Valli is an inconspicuous employee in a large automobile company. His modest job status is perfectly illustrated by the floor he works on. One morning, he hears from the CEO that none other than the company's founder and Vice President, Giovanni Nosferatu, has summoned Alberto to his mansion in a remote mountain area. With a name like that, Alberto should know better than to accept, but he's honored and undertakes the journey. He meets up with a half-naked hitchhiker and a whole bunch of dead-silent mountain villagers before arriving at the estate. Nosferatu is a strange fella, or what else did you expect, but he does make some very impossible-to-refuse offers to Alberto.

There are many bizarre gimmicks in "They've Changed Faces", and the fact they remain unexplained only makes the film more intriguing. What is a topless hippie girl doing in the middle of nowhere? What is the meaning of Nosferatu's mute henchmen driving around the estate in white Fiat 500s? Why does Alberto leave behind a gorgeous naked girl and sleeps around with a creepy, asexual secretary instead? How brilliant is the idea of playing advertisements when sitting down in a chair or stepping into a shower?

The essence of the film, namely that old-fashioned Gothic vampires have evolved and now form the elite members of the business, media, advertisement, sports,religious, artistic world, is truly unique. Adolfo Celi is fantastic, as usual, but I would have preferred he had more screen time. The musical score by Amadeo Tommasi (also known for his excellent work for "The House with Laughing Windows) is the best thing in an already very good movie. Writer/director Corrado Farina's other cult-horror flick "Baba Yaga" might be more popular and better known, but personally I think this one is a much better film.

This Italian horror film is one that is most certainly coming at us from a decidedly different angle. Its director Corrado Farina was also responsible for the more well-known Baba Yaga but for my money They Have Changed Their Face is the better film. It's an adaption of Bram Stoker's novel Dracula but with some serious differences. In it the Dracula substitute is a powerful businessman called Giovanni Nosferatu. Like the book, he also lives in a remote mountainous region of Eastern Europe and the storyline also follows a hapless businessman who has been sent to see him. But aside from a similar basic story structure this film takes the material into very unusual places. Atypically for an Italian horror film this is a somewhat satirical movie. It's an allegory on capitalism, where the modern vampires have moved with the times and now prey on the public differently. Instead of sucking their blood, they suck the life from them with soul-destroying commercials and generally prey on the population with ruthless capitalism.

All this is well and good but what takes it up a level is the overall strangeness of the presentation. The vampire's house is a crumbling old building but inside it is very chic and modern. His henchmen drive around in white minis while sporting jump suits and helmets. While inside the house the hero is exposed to commercials; cumulating in an excellent later scene where a selection of newly developed adverts are shown to Mr Nosferatu in his board room. It's all very disconcerting and, to be honest, it's very hard predicting where this one is going to go. This is very inventive genre film-making that's for sure. The soundtrack by Amedeo Tommasi is great as well, with a variety of tones and themes. It helps set the atmosphere, which is one of real mystery. There is also a good cast too. Adolfo Celi is well suited to the role of Giovanni Nosferatu. But perhaps most interesting of all is Geraldine Hooper who was most famous for her turn as a male homosexual in Dario Argento's Deep Red. Frankly, it was only due to this film that I was even aware that she was not a bloke!

This is one of the most original Italian genre pictures from the 70's. It's one that certainly needs to be seen by a far wider audience.

Just like Baba Yaga, Corrado Farina's only other film made for cinema, They Have Changed Their Face is a quasi-horror film which is really a commentary on something else altogether, and although unlike that film there's no animation or boxing matches with Jesus, there's enough weirdness to carry the threadbare plot.

Alberto works for an automobile company and is delighted to find that the CEO of the company wants to speak to him. He travels to the top of the building where he discovers that the actual true owner of the company is a Mr Nosferatu (Adolfo Celi), who wishes to have Alberto visit his remote villa in the mountains. Alberto hasn't read Bram Stoker's Dracula and thinks there's nothing creepy about that at all.

Things do start getting creepy when the guy and the petrol station runs off when he asks for directions to the villa, and no one will speak to him in the village except a travelling hippy chick who is swanning around the place looking for a lift to somewhere more interesting. Alberto obliges, probably because he's a nice guy and probably not because this chick is walking around with her boobs hanging out.

She gives him the usual 'living free/non-conformist' jive these hippies like to bore people with, and then starts putting the moves on him, but Alberto is determined to see his boss. Laura (the hippy) elects to wait in the car for him while he makes his way up to one of the stranger villas to appear in Italian cinema. For starters, he's escorted to this house by two silent men driving tiny white cars. He's then ushered into the building by a very pale, tall woman who is Mr Nosferatu's secretary. She informs Alberto that Mr Nosferatu doesn't entertain visitors until the evening but in the meantime Alberto is free to relax and have a drink. Alberto (and the audience) quickly find out that the real purpose of the plot is for director Farina to make some sort of comment on the symbiotic relationship between consumer and the big corporations who offer us every product we desire. This is done subtly when Alberto's arse makes contact with a couch and an advert about the couch starts blaring from speaks on the wall. This also happens when he uses a certain shower gel and of course a 'Mr Nosferatu' brand johnny to shag Nosferatu's secretary.

It becomes clear soon enough that Farina is in piss-take mode as he makes fun of the Dracula story (Nosferatu does have a crypt, for instance, but also likes to shoot targets that yell when he hits one). Alberto is the Jonathan Harker character who tries to escape as things get stranger, but is lured back by the secretary, and of course the promotion of a high-level promotion.

The best bit for me was when Nosferatu has a board meeting to discuss the mass-marketing of LSD and is shown three different adverts. One makes fun off Jean Luc-Godard's socio-political style, and best of all there's a Fellini pastiche where a clown plays a trombone in the middle of a field while his mother and father look on. It's nearly, but not quite, as fun as Baba Yaga, this one.

I don't know if I haven't to even mention the quality of Adolfo Celi's acting. He seems to pull any character without any effort whatsoever, so even a vampiric corporate fat cat comes across naturally and charming.

And that hippy in the car? Farina saves the best joke for last...