During its heydey the Italian popular cinema was dominated by the filone or tributary principle whereby a successful film, domestic or foreign, quickly spawned a wave of imitations by film-makers desperate to cash-in before interest waned.
As an exemplar of this tendency you could do a lot worse than Alberto De Martino's 1974 film The Antichrist , an obvious rip-off of William Friedkin's The Exorcist covering all the same stations of the inverted cross – speaking in tongues, head spinning, pea-soup vomiting etc. -with enthusiasm, while chucking a few ideas of its own into the mix.
We open with Ippolita Oderisi (Carla Gravina) and her father Massimo (Mel Ferrer – both the Tobe Hooper and Umberto Lenzi Eaten Alive 's, Nightmare City etc.) visiting a Roman shrine in the hope of finding a cure for Ippolita's paralysis, the result of the childhood road accident in which her mother died.
Also present among the crowds are a couple of guys whose friend, played by the ever-creepy Ernesto Colli ( Torso , Autopsy etc) is evidently possessed. He breaks free as he's taken to touch the Virgin Mary runs off and throws himself from atop the ruins.
Back home, we're introduced to the rest of the Oderisi family in the form of Ippolita's brother Felippo and stepmother-to-be Greta (giallo stalwart Anita Strindberg) and loyal, long-suffering retainer Irene (Alida Valli – Suspiria , Inferno etc.).
Still seeking a cure for his daughter Massimo goes to see his brother Ascanio (Arthur Kennedy, like Ferrer another Hollywood veteran with many Italian genre films to his credit at this time), a Bishop at the Vatican.
Seeing as Ippolita's paralysis is mental rather than physical in origin, the surprisingly ecumenical Ascanio suggests that Massimo might next try a psychoanalyst he met, Dr Sinibaldi, atheist though he may be.
Meanwhile an icon bearing a demonic-looking Christ, previously glimpsed on the possessed man, inexplicably appears amidst Ippolita's jewelry and, before long, she is being plagued by strange visions of an ancestor indulging in black masses as, in the film's most outre moment, we cut away from a shot of a goat's rear end to Ippolita tonguing away furiously…
Sinibaldi arrives and attempts to effect a cure via hypnosis and regression therapy. It seems, momentarily, to have worked as Ippolita, gets up and walks.
But, as she then goes berserk at the dinner table and starts telling Greta to kiss her arse in German – a language Ippolitia does not know, apparently – it becomes increasingly obvious that something is up.
In fact, the Devil, whose attempts to have one of Ippolita's ancestors bear him a son four hundred years ago were thwarted by the inquisition, had returned to avenge himself and bring about the birth of the Antichrist.
Time for some exorcise, then…
The worst thing about The Antichrist is its leaden pace. While the same could be said of its model, The Exorcist's setting and set-up allow for a sustained period of ambiguity and investigation impossible here, where the weight of history – eternal city and eternal church and all that – is ever-present and where the audience would likely be mightily PO'd if the case of suspected diabolic possession were to prove nothing but a giallo-style conspiracy.
Thankfully the compensations when we finally do get there are just about worth it, the low budget compensated for by an enthusiastic lack of inhibition and taste.
Technical qualities are also solid throughout, as could be expected from the likes of cinematographer Aristide Massaccesi, favoured Lucio Fulci editor Vincenzo Tomasso and composer Ennio Morricone who, ironically, would go on to score Exorcist II four years later. Some of the effects are dated, but this is to be expected.
Also of interest is the way in which certain aspects of the film seem to prefigure later genre entries, with the birth of the Antichrist theme strangely reminiscent of Clive Donner's The Omen – which, true to form, De Martino would rip off with 1978's Holocaust 2000 – and, perhaps, a few passing similarities to Dario Argento's Suspiria and Inferno – or maybe it's just seeing Alida Valli in weirdly decorated interiors, the passageway to Ippolita's room flanked by lines of statues that are nicely used by De Martino as a way of commenting on the action.
The Antichrist is presented by Anchor Bay in a nice 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer, with a couple of featurette interviews with De Martino and Morricone and the obligatory trailer spots and stills/poster gallery.
Copyright © K H Brown 2002-2005
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