Contronatura

Pros: Fantastic gothic atmosphere. Dark and stormy night. Creepy house in the forest. A group of haunted people participate in a seance. I enjoyed the camerawork and direction by Antonio Margheriti. Some of the moving shots helped keep the film engaging. There is a good amount of old-fashioned suspense here. Marianne Koch shines in the cast.

Cons: I thought the ending ultimately took away from the events that proceeded it. I didn't like it. There is a homophobic depiction of bisexual or lesbian woman. I didn't like that either. There are a number of flashbacks throughout the film. Some of them help the film, but some of them derail the momentum of the central story.

At the end of the day, it's worth a watch if you're a fan of these things, but the average viewer can skip this one.

A rich old man and his greedy group of hangers-on get stranded in the middle of nowhere when their car breaks down (in a thunderstorm, of course) and the motley crew make their way to an old dark house where they interrupt a seance that reveals their deadly secrets...

What's basically an Agatha Christie murder mystery set in the Roaring Twenties gets all supernatural in the last ten minutes but it's too little too late for anyone expecting a horror film. Although flashbacks help open things up, it's still a "drawing room whodunit" at heart with nice period detail (except for the hairdos) and a bit more style than usual for this sort of thing. The (brief) sex scenes are lesbian (were they "the unnaturals"?) but not erotic and the movie's nothing to get excited about, either, despite its reputation as one of the director's best.

A group of English folks (well, German, actually) are trying to get to their home amidst the mother of all thunderstorms that is washing out all the roads. With their car stuck in the mud, they have to walk to a nearby house inhabited by "Uriat" (Luciano Pigozza aka Alan Collins) and his mother. Now this woman (Marianne Leibl) is quite adept at séances and soon the group are sitting around the table where truths will out. These truths, played out via a series of flashbacks, are unsavoury and depict some of the group as malevolent, murdering, monsters. The more we learn, the more dangerous it gets for all concerned. Will they all leave that place alive? Aside from the audio of a biblical storm the sort not seen since Noah, the rest of this is all rather cheaply cobbled together with far too much (badly dubbed) dialogue that, in the end, presents us with a sort of brutal episode of "Upstairs Downstairs". Quite why there is an English setting is anyone's guess - it seems to create additional impediments to the already rather predictably weak characterisations. Eighty minutes felt a great deal longer as it lumbered along to a conclusion about which I simply didn't care. I wouldn't bother, I'm afraid.

The Unnaturals takes place in England circa the roaring '20s (or the late-'60s, judging by the women's hairstyles): after their car gets stuck in mud during a thunderstorm, a group of people take shelter at a nearby house, home to Uriat (Peter Lorre-alike Luciano Pigozzi) and his mother (Marianne Leibl), who is in a trance as a result of a seance being interrupted by the visitors. In order to try and bring the woman back from the 'other dimension', the guests agree to complete the seance, during which their darkest secrets are revealed.

Despite plenty of treachery, murder and a little gratuitous lesbianism (very tame by today's standards), Antonio Margheriti's The Unnaturals is quite a tedious affair, hampered by leaden pacing, a confusing narrative structure (there are quite a number of flashbacks), too much talk, and a predictable ending: my guess that the characters were all ghosts wasn't too wide of the mark. Some say that this film is one of Margheriti's best, but I much preferred Castle of Blood and Cannibal Apocalypse (hell, Killer Fish is preferable to this one).

To be honest, despite my more than fair knowledge of the "Euro-Cult" style of film-making, I only recently became aware of this particular title – where it was even described as possibly Margheriti's best work; having watched THE UNNATURALS for myself now, I would actually be hard-pressed to disagree with that assessment: it certainly ranks among the top three efforts by this major exponent that I am familiar with, along with two other Gothic horror entries i.e. THE LONG HAIR OF DEATH (1964) and SEVEN DEATHS IN THE CAT'S EYE (1973). For the record, this is a German-Italian co-production to which the director himself contributed the script – a highly atmospheric chiller (with a séance figuring prominently throughout) yet boasting an atypical elegance due to its 1920s England setting. Interestingly, the plot more or less harks back to vintage "old dark house"-type pictures (emanating from this very era i.e. the last days of Silent cinema) and which revolved around a gathering at some remote location for the sake of an inheritance that goes terribly wrong, resulting in a murder spree; actually, this takes things a bit further (also taking advantage of the permissiveness of the age with its inclusion of by-now quite mild instances of nudity) – where the vicissitudes of the crime are slowly assembled via multiple flashbacks (unveiling various illicit affairs, both financial and romantic, into the bargain) and the whole set-up ultimately revealed to be an elaborate retribution (incorporating surprisingly neat, i.e. not heavy-handed, apocalyptic connotations) from beyond the grave! Though somewhat undercast, there are still a few familiar faces among the actors recruited for the movie – Joachim (DEAD EYES OF London [1961]) Fuchsberger, Claudio Camaso (a Tomas Milian look-alike but really the younger brother of Gian Maria Volonte' whose life ended in tragedy!), Marianne Koch (from A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS [1964] and exhibiting here lesbian tendencies which prove her undoing in both the past and present time-frames of the narrative), Dominique (FANTASTIC ARGOMAN [1967]) Boschero and, of course, Luciano Pigozzi (distinguished by his uncanny physical resemblance to Peter Lorre) in perhaps the most significant role of his prolific career. For fear of repeating myself (see the concluding statement in my AMUCK! [1972] review elsewhere), the appropriately old-fashioned strains of Carlo Savina's score provides one further reason to enjoy this – for "Euro"-buffs and adventurous movie fans alike; it goes without saying, then, that this is a title that ought to sustain a lot more than the current semi-obscure reputation I alluded to at the start...