Friday, October 12, 2012

Blood Orgy Of The She-Devils (1972)

Because of the title Blood Orgy Of The She-Devils, I expected this movie to have a blood orgy of the she-devils. Silly me.

The film opens with a dance and a sacrifice. I'm already confused, because the dancing girls are fully clothed.  Mara (Lila Zaborin) leads a group of witches. She says "So mote it be" a lot, so clearly writer/director Ted V. Mikels researched witchcraft a bit and then decided to use the one thing he learned over and over.  Actually, in the DVD commentary, Mikels talks about how he did a lot of research for this film (I'm not kidding). He went to several seances, and then locked himself away for a week to write the screenplay. If only he'd locked himself away for another week and refrained from shooting the film. But no luck there.

Anyway, the fully clothed witches stab a guy with some spears. And the movie is on its way. Lila Zaborin says every line the same way - slowly, seriously and angrily - even when she asks for wine. Two guys want her to use her black magic to kill a man, and they hand her a photograph of their intended victim.

Meanwhile Lorraine (Leslie McRae) shows up at the castle to look into a crystal ball.  She (or is it some other brunette? it's pretty dark in there) sees herself strangled by some guy.  Apparently, it's her death from a prior lifetime.  So it is not at all important or related to anything happening now.  The next day Lorraine and her boyfriend Mark are having a picnic. She is wearing a ridiculously sexy outfit and talking about a seance at the castle.  So they decide to go (but for some reason don't sit next to each other). At the seance, Mara calls upon her Indian guide, Tacowanna (wanna taco? no thanks), and then moans a whole lot.  Apparently it's not fun for her. It's not fun for us either. However, a couple of the girls there are hot, particularly the one the Indian spirit calls "squaw." Yes, Mara does a really bad, stereotypical American Indian voice, and tells the hot girl to go inside a teepee, then "You burn 'em hair in fire."  She then tells the next girl, "No take big shiny bird cross big waters." This goes on for a while, and then Mara takes on a different spirit, Jessica, and gives more advice from the beyond.  But who gives a shit? Take off your clothes. Get to the orgy already.  There is then a ghost, but it does nothing. Its brief appearance is the big finale of the seance. Time to go.

Later Mara takes the photo that the men gave her and yells, while putting her hands inside a big wine glass. At that same moment, at a very dull gathering somewhere, a guy dies.  The two men see that the witch's black magic worked, and so they decide they'd better kill her because she's dangerous. Meanwhile Mara tells a redhead to meditate using the fire and "the powers of karma."  Yes, the powers of karma.  The guys show up and kill Mara, the redhead, plus some other guy. His death is amusing. But where is the orgy?

Mara vanishes. Then a cat appears. The cat goes over to the dead guy, so he gets up. Then she's back to her human form. So everything is back to normal, which means none of what just happened matters. Mara makes a voodoo doll of the guy that shot her. Okay, who cares? It makes him itchy, so he jumps out a window. Then she makes a doll of the other guy.  I mean, seriously, we don't care about any of this. So then the film cuts to a flashback to something completely unrelated (perhaps as a ploy to make us care more about the other crap we just saw, which by comparison now seems somewhat worthwhile). The flashback is to a witch being tortured, and then a boy being whipped while his witch mother watches.  This has no bearing on the story whatsoever, but on its own is actually more interesting than anything in the actual story.

The biggest horror in this film is the pool-side furniture.  Yikes!  Mark and Lorraine have a series of conversations with a professor who likes to ramble on about black magic. They first talk in their home after a game of chess, then next to a pool, then in a restaurant.  It's all very exciting.  Where will they talk next?  But seriously, take a look at that pool furniture.  Frightening.

Well, there is another scene from a past life - some blonde being stoned to death. It's all fun until a guy drops a large rock on her, ruining it for the rest of the players. As you might have guessed, this has nothing to do with anything, and functions solely to make this film the respectable length of 79 minutes.

And then there is another seance. The girls start to dance, and for some reason it's the guys that are shirtless. For Lorraine, it's all about the dancing. She clearly hears a different song from the rest of the girls. And she doesn't care that Mark is tied down (though neither do we). At the end of a long day of listening to some idiot talk, she likes to unwind with a seance and a dance.  But where is the orgy? The professor and three doctors gather outside and become religious weirdos. They really have no idea what's going on inside, but they decide it's not good, and so call on the power of Jesus to stop it (yes, that's right, they carry on their own crazy ritual). The girls inside panic and kill each other.  Then the doctors go inside to see what Jesus did.  And that's the film.  Yup.

Blood Orgy Of The She-Devils stars Lila Zaborin, Victor Izay, Tom Pace, Leslie McRae and William Bagdad. (Leslie McRae and Tom Pace also starred in Ted V. Mikels' Girl In Gold Boots.)

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