What do I make of this film? Well first, Sergio Bergonzelli did some of the more weird genre films during the seventies, and some of them are good too. How he managed to cast John Phillip Law for this one is beyond me, because this is probably one of the weirdest films I have ever seen. Quite entertaining and unusually gory and sleazy for being a film from 1988 (when the italians really had begun to make less extreme films since some four years back). The dubbing is awful, and the soundtrack sounds like something from a mexican Falcon Crest-ripoff. The end result is just bizarre and some of the scenes has acting and dialogue so bad you will be surprised. A mixed bag worth seeing for fans of italian 80's horror. If you like Fulci's lesser films, then chances are you are going to love this one.

First of all, this flick is extremely hard to find, so I had to search real hard around the globe to track it down until I did in a full uncut version with irremovable Greek subtitles. And it was a VHS copy, luckily not to much damaged and English spoken. After five minutes it was already clear that this was an Italian production. But surely not one of those giallo productions. The style of filming was typical, the shots, the sound, the dubbing. You are immediately involved in the movie, a bit Gothic in the beginning with the ghost appearing in the castle. Also the unnecessary nudity in the beginning, not that we mind, had nothing to do with the flick but is/was typical Italian style. The movie itself is about a painter losing his wife and becoming mad when he sees another girl that looks really the same like his dead wife. But he goes nuts and his , let's call him the butler , is insane too. After the painter his wife died and laying in her coffin the butler starts making love to her, necrophilia. So this flick becomes weirder and weirder, they capture some girls, hang them upside down, slice their throat and use the red stuff to paint. And the butler cuts the bodies in pieces after you guess, misused their bodies. It still gets weirder so one to watch, if, as said in the beginning you are able to catch a copy.

Man, has John Phillip Law been around the world or what? Here he plays a painter - who thinks he's the reincarnation of Van Gogh - whose wife's death sends him even deeper down the path of no return who decides to dig up her bones for inspiration. Then he finds another woman who looks just like his wife - alert Joe D'Amato, someone is ripping you off for once - and she discovers that his necrophiliac butler (Gordon Mitchell!) is killing women and bottling their blood for the artist's paint.

Director Sergio Bergonzelli was an early Italian Western director, making The Last Gun and Colt in the Hand of the Devil before making just one very odd giallo - In the Folds of the Flesh - before a career in sex movies. He came back to make the more mainstream erotic thriller Tentazione, then this movie and finally one more sexy film with Malizia oggi.

Why Severin hasn't released this - and Spider Labyrinth - is beyond me.