Judging by the reviews here on IMDb, others seem to appreciate this film a lot more than I do. I found the plot to be confusing, the pace sluggish, and, to be quite frank, I couldn't stand the child Emily (played by Nicoletta Elmi), her constant crying out for daddy making her as annoying as that other whimpering brat of '70s horror, Audrey Rose.
The plot-or what I could gather-goes like this: Emily asks her father, BBC documentary maker Michael Williams (Richard Johnson), for the medallion that belonged to her mother, who died in a fire. For some reason I couldn't quite fathom, this causes the girl to have convulsions and kill those around her. The answer to her condition lies in a mysterious painting belonging to Contessa Cappelli (Lila Kedrova), who says that the picture mysteriously appeared two centuries earlier, at the same time as the death of a young girl named Emilia.
Is Emily possessed by Emilia? I haven't a Scooby. There's so much in this film that I did not understand that I quickly became bored. What was the relevance of the medallion? Why was there an identical trinket hidden inside a statue? What was the meaning of the letter found by the Contessa? Why was part of the painting encrusted in dirt? Was there some deeper meaning to the barrel of wine crashing into the car? Why did the Contessa see Michael banging on a door when he was hundreds of miles away in London? And that double-bladed sword... what was that all about? All very confusing!
To try and alleviate matters a little, director Massimo Dallamano chucks in not one, but two, sex scenes (both between Michael and his production manager Joanna, played by Joanna Cassidy), and includes a couple of deaths rendered laughable by the terrible special effects, but it's not nearly enough to make me recommend the film to anyone but the most determined of Italian horror completists.
The plot-or what I could gather-goes like this: Emily asks her father, BBC documentary maker Michael Williams (Richard Johnson), for the medallion that belonged to her mother, who died in a fire. For some reason I couldn't quite fathom, this causes the girl to have convulsions and kill those around her. The answer to her condition lies in a mysterious painting belonging to Contessa Cappelli (Lila Kedrova), who says that the picture mysteriously appeared two centuries earlier, at the same time as the death of a young girl named Emilia.
Is Emily possessed by Emilia? I haven't a Scooby. There's so much in this film that I did not understand that I quickly became bored. What was the relevance of the medallion? Why was there an identical trinket hidden inside a statue? What was the meaning of the letter found by the Contessa? Why was part of the painting encrusted in dirt? Was there some deeper meaning to the barrel of wine crashing into the car? Why did the Contessa see Michael banging on a door when he was hundreds of miles away in London? And that double-bladed sword... what was that all about? All very confusing!
To try and alleviate matters a little, director Massimo Dallamano chucks in not one, but two, sex scenes (both between Michael and his production manager Joanna, played by Joanna Cassidy), and includes a couple of deaths rendered laughable by the terrible special effects, but it's not nearly enough to make me recommend the film to anyone but the most determined of Italian horror completists.