SEX OF THE WITCH

On his deathbed, the elderly Thomas Hilton gathers all his relatives for a final farewell and announces that the horrible secret of the Hilton family would die with him. After the funeral, the notary reads Mr. Hilton's will to his relatives, from which it is learned that all his assets and the castle must be equally divided among his relatives except his sister Evelyn, accused of witchcraft. All the heirs then settle in the castle and dedicate themselves to their passions, but a mysterious killer begins to kill, one by one, all the heirs of the Hilton family. For the series "The ugly has no limits," here we are in front of "The Sex of the Witch," a title with an effect for one of the most disorganized and ugly paranormal-thrillers that Italian cinema has produced in the 1970s. Our genre cinema between the 1960s and 1970s reached very high peaks by adding good films to good films. Directors of the caliber of Mario Bava, Dario Argento, Lucio Fulci, Riccardo Freda, and Antonio Margheriti, just to name the most famous, have given the collective cinematic imagination true gems never equaled by our national productions. But there was also an underworld of directors who juggled between horror, erotic, and who knows what else, representing the dark side of this harmonious band of "Big Names," craftsmen with not too much talent who seized the opportunity of the trend of the moment and gave life to questionable feature films that today are worshipped as authentic "scult." Among them, Angelo (in art Elo) Pannacciò is one of the most representative, especially for "The Sex of the Witch," a thriller of rare ugliness that blends together Italian Gothic, giallo-thriller (at its peak of diffusion at that time) and erotic. Pannacciò, also the author of the screenplay together with Franco Brocani, had an interesting and above all original starting point to work on: magic (mixed with science) used for the sex change of an individual. Unfortunately, this starting point is not explored at all and the entire screenplay appears too inconclusive, composed of a few events that are inserted into the narration often without a real logical connection. Furthermore, the author himself does not seem to have very clear ideas about which genre to lean on, whether on the thriller-horror or on the erotic. If indeed the structure is that typical of the thriller, with white weapon murders and mysterious killer to unmask, the suspense is never emphasized and the same murders are choreographed in a clumsy way and surely not "scary." Instead, the film abounds with erotic scenes, passionate embraces, and frequent nudity, often inserted in a very gratuitous way, but, alas, in this case too Pannacciò fails and his scenes do not manage to infuse real eroticism, since in this case too we have awkward scenes, poorly shot and often ridiculous (practically every time the erotomaniac butler enters the scene). The numerous characters do not have adequate characterization, in fact, some of them appear and disappear without a real reason; among them, the absurd police inspector (played by Donald O'Brien) who is entrusted with some of the most inconclusive dialogues of the film must certainly be remembered. Obviously, "The Sex of the Witch," like every good scult that respects itself, has a multitude of unlikely scenes that calmly end in involuntary ridicule and among which the libidinous looks of the butler, the animalistic jungle screams that are heard at night outside the castle, the hilarious corpse silhouette (equipped with all the fingers) and the shocking final freeze frame on the spread legs of the cleaning lady must absolutely be mentioned. However, despite these moments of unintended hilarity, the film does not really manage to entertain, on the contrary, it is boring due to the repetitiveness of the events and the excessive staticity of the action that characterizes a practically inconsistent plot. The only winning assets of this very ugly film are the music by Daniele Patucchi (however poorly used) and the presence of Camille Keaton, famous in the genre cinema landscape for her fundamental roles in "Cosa avete fatto a Solange?", "Extracted from the secret archives of the police of a European capital" and "Don't Violate Jennifer."