Tragic ceremony

This somehow odd film from Italian Cult Gothic Horror director Freda ("L'Orribile Segreto del Dr. Hichcock") is almost unknown and extremely difficult to find nowadays.

Made a year after his rough Giallo "L'Iguana Dalla Lingua di Fuoco" (see also my comment on that), the title suggests yet another Giallo (it means "Taken From the Secret Police Files of a European Capital" and fits perfectly into typical over long and wonderful Giallo titles like "Il Tuo Vizio e una Stanza Chiusa e Solo Io ne ho la Chiave" of the same year). But, in fact, this film is not a Giallo at all - but a Gothic horror story about a cursed pearl necklace and a strange Satan's Cult which gets confronted by a hippie quartet on a day out. The story sounds unique, and the film is it, too.

Made on a very low budget, Freda made more than the best out of it and created a strange movie with all the classic Gothic elements, and also boosts a handful of astonishing gore effects that echo the rude sequences of his Giallo a year before.

The cast is lead by Camille Keaton of "I Spit on Your Grave" fame, while Luigi Pistilli ("Reazione a Catena") delivers another neat performance as the leader of the strange Cult. The soundtrack is composed by Stelvio Cipriani and is cool as usual. A film worth looking for despite its rarity.

Tragic Ceremony is certainly tragic. This 70s attempt at Satanic horror is lazy and meandering, in a bad way. A wealthy man, a pretty young woman who at first appears to be his date, and two hired men are sailing on a beautiful day. When they set up camp on the beach, it becomes obvious that the three men are actually all friends and that the lady is with one of the poorer fellows. Fair enough.

Even audio in Italian couldn't save this film. The lead actress has a terrible face, she always looks like she's upset, defiant, or pouting. She never reacts normally to any circumstance - being quietly rude to her hostess at the mansion, then switching to unnaturally calm after she's almost sacrificed to the devil.

But wait! That's only the middle of the movie!

The group tries to run away from the Satanists to find shelter, only to be kicked out by the rich guy's mom. When they flee to his father's cabin instead, the aforementioned rich guy suddenly appears dead in an antique armoire, and the immediate cause can only be that he's covered in green paint. Yikes.

An early appearance by Camille Keaton gives Tragic Ceremony its main point of interest. It's not as good as What Have You Done to Soalnge?, but her role is substantial enough for fans to check it out.

Probably it ranks as the second-best of her Italian-era appearances. Her icy beauty and blank expression are suited to her largely passive role.

The plot falls into the Old Dark House genre, with four fashionable and well-off young people becoming stranded at a mansion on a stormy night. Sort of like a straight non-musical version of Rocky Horror.

Black magic and other supernatural events follow, with logic going out the window. The supernatural elements keep this from really being considered as classical giallo.

But there is a fair bit of detective work and violent crime, so some people still put under the giallo banner. It's not apparent in the costumes and locations, but the action is supposed to be in the UK as Scotland Yard is mentioned.

Overall, it is a bit of a generic mix of Gothic horror and police motifs that never reaches its full potential.

This late-ish effort from Freda plays as a modern day (70's that is) Gothic thriller, but comes out short of thrills. Certainly it's not a dreadfully bad film, it's jut got that feeling which many of Freda's later films have of someone who has given up when he's seen the first daily's. It starts out good enough, almost giallo like in tone, then takes a turn into Gothic territories with a decent (albeit terribly cliché) set up. Then suddenly Freda seems to have lost interest in the film and all we get is prolonged shots of Camille Keaton and burning candles. Then circa an hour into the film we get some sort of violent climax with decent-to-poor special effects. This is followed by a slow paced outro with a very obvious twist ending (If it's even intended to be a twist?). And throw a few very halfhearted explanatory scenes along the way and you got Tragic Ceremony. Thus in parts it's got its qualities. But then suddenly stumbles and collapses in front of you. A pity.

btw stay away from the SHAROMA DVD, a useless murky pan& scan edition which kills of what could be a good visual experience.

"Tragic Ceremony" follows a group of hippies (three men, one woman) whose car dies during a rainstorm in the English countryside. They end up at a large estate where the lord and his lady offer them fuel for their car and a place to sleep. Unfortunately, the house guests are subject to a black mass and attempted human sacrifice that goes awry; they escape the event, only to be picked off one by one in the ensuing hours.

This generally weird and largely unknown horror flick was briefly unearthed by Dark Sky Films, who released it on DVD in 2008, but it's still one of the lesser-known oddities of early seventies Italian horror. The film starts out rather orthodox with its young adult characters stumbling into a large mansion, but it doesn't follow the narrative trajectory one would expect. The film's centerpiece is undoubtedly the explosively gory black mass sequence, but rather than occurring at the climax, it instead happens about midway through; this gives the film's narrative arc a remarkably unusual shape that destabilizes the audience's expectations, be it for better or for worse.

While this central scene boasts some creepy imagery and surprising gore, the dreamlike second act of the film is what I found to be most unsettling. After the surreal black mass sequence, the audience follows the four characters in the aftermath of it, which plays out with heady overtones. The heightened black mass scene seems to have the effect of unsettling the audience as much as the flummoxed characters who are trying to piece together what they witnessed, and from there onward the film begins to unravel in the style of a supernatural slasher flick. Their retreat to the country house offers a few chilling scenes, but perhaps most memorable are the one-on-one scenes between Jane and Joe in the penultimate sequence in the woods. There is a quiet, unsettling tone that is rather masterfully achieved in the last half of the film, and this sequence in particular offers some chilling images and atmosphere.

Camille Keaton stars here as the female lead, just after she'd completed her debut work on the giallo "What Have You Done to Solange?" She has an ethereal but disquieting screen presence as always, and the performance is understated but effective. She is surrounded with three Italian/Spanish male actors, each of whom play off of both her and each other fairly well as disaffected hippies. The film has a clever twist at the end that is unfortunately marred by a slipshod imitation of the conclusion from "Psycho," which feels totally unnecessary and tacked on with little forethought.

The silly handling of the conclusion aside, I still found "Tragic Ceremony" to be a weirdly unsettling film. It is certainly not a masterpiece, but the bizarre narrative arc combined with the moody cinematography and Keaton's haunted performance really lend some vitality to the proceedings. The last half of the film plays out like a dream (or a nightmare), and there is an appreciable sense of foreboding that can't be shaken by the audience anymore than it can the characters on screen. 7/10.