Apparently, this is based on some Italian comic books by a guy named Guido Crepex. Since I don’t buy any comics that don’t involve Jimmy Olsen turning into a giant turtle or the Legion Of Super-Pets, I don’t know what the deal is, but I’m guessing it’s probably something dirty since it’s drawn by a European and those guys never seem to remember that comics are supposed to be good clean male power fantasy fun where impossibly muscled studs physically dominate one another.
This movie turns up the originality a notch from your usual ameteurish Italian horror flick when they have the person being harassed by supernatural forces not be a fashion model, but a fashion model photographer!
And when this witch starting using the fashion model photographer’s favorite camera to kill the people she was photographing, it was almost as awesome as when that telephone stalked that fashion model in Dial: Help!
Valentina is walking around town at 3:00 a.m. when she sees a dog in the road with a strange marking on his head. Now me, I always put any pets and kids up for adoption when they have strange markings on their head since I see The Omen as a cautionary tale, but this crazy dame gets all “who’s a cute widdle doggy” on this hell hound and pulls him out of the path of an oncoming car.
The driver turns out to be noneother than the world famous devil witch, Baba Yaga! She tries to get Valentina to go home with her, but only manages to take a snap from her garter belt from her as a souvenir. What ever happened to witchs that stole a strand of hair or something? 1970s occult happenings were definitely not family friendly!
Somehow or other Valentina ends up at Baba Yaga’s forboding house. Valentina notices the bottomless pit in Baba’s living room (it’s covered by a rug) and Baba tells her not to sweat it, that the house is kind of a fixer upper and there’s bound be some “problem areas.”
Baba gives Valentina a doll dressed up in some black leather harness and Valentina has the doll, her camera starts killing people!
This doll also manages to poke someone with a big needle in the dark, but Valentina can’t quite bring herself to kill the doll. (Probably because it’s a doll and thus isn’t really being capable of being killed.)
Valentina is also quite busy having these artsy-fartsy dreams about Nazis and stuff. There’s scenes where she’s a Nazi and shoots someone and there was one where she was in a boxing ring and a few others that were clearly designed to trick the audience into thinking that something important was being said.
I never figured out what it was, but who’s going to care what was going on in those dreams since that dang doll went and turned into a real live harness-wearing woman! I don’t know why that happened. (I guess I’m supposed to write it off as part of Baba Yaga’s really obtuse scheme to put the moves on Valentina, but really, wouldn’t a regular old love potion accomplish the same thing a lot faster?)
After a few people get victimized by Valentina’s crabby camera (and to her credit she does switch cameras at some point), she ends up back at Baba Yaga’s house and gets abused by the living doll before her sometimes boyfriend appears to rescue her.
The final showdown is all that you would expect when it involves a killer doll. The boyfriend smacks her in the head and she turns back into a doll and her head rolls down the stairs. Then Valentina and Baba Yaga have a toe to toe battle that basically involves Baba falling backwards into her bottomless pit. (Shoot, she was meaning to get that fixed, too!)
Despite the presence of the scantily clad doll and Nazi dreams, I’m going to need a little more than people falling over dead just because someone took their picture before I get all amped up over a movie.
I guess it would have been nice if we would have known something about Baba Yaga and her witchy ways, but what really would have helped would have been some reason for why Baba was even bothering with this Valentina chick and what she hoped to accomplish with all her superpowers. (Admittedly cool superpowers since they are seemingly confined to stealing bits of undergarments and animating strangely-clad dolls.)
The dreams in the film also don’t really work because the rest of the movie is already like a dream – nonsensical and something you can’t seem to wake up from. Even the doll looks chintzy – just look at how easy it fell apart!)
The thing of note in this movie is that it allows you to see whatever became of Gregory Peck’s uppity fiancee from The Big Country, Carrol Baker, who plays Baba Yaga. At least when Peck slipped into horror movies like The Omen, he was killed by the Antichrist, not by falling down a hole in the living room floor.
© 2011 MonsterHunter
