Director Mario Bava opens the action with a beautifully shot opening sequence where the dastardly Princess Asa is being put to death for her black magic, consorting with Satan, and generally being a giant rag.
The guy heading up the stake-burning has a little something special planned for Asa. He went to all the trouble of having this really nifty metal mask made that he’s going to let Asa wear as she’s being burned. And just to make sure that it doesn’t fall off when things get hot, it has a whole bunch of really sharp spikes on the inside of it! This is where the big fat dude with the really large sledge hammer comes into the picture.
After some fancy camera shots through the mask, the mask is held over Asa’s whining face and this guy with the sledge comes in and smashes it right down onto her face, driving the spiked mask into her satanic head!
I was amazed. I mean, you would thing a terrific blow like that would have dented the mask or at least cracked it, but the thing still looked mint!
Before they pounded the mask onto her head though, she squeezed out one of those nasty curses that witches always lay down on the unsuspecting busy bodies in charge of witch burning.
You know the curse I’m talking about. It’s about how the descendants of the dopes that burned up the witch will be cursed to have really bad things happen to them, like terrible deaths, being possessed by the ghost of the burned up witch, downturn in the family business, kids dropping out of college to join a band – that sort of thing. Why they don’t gag these hussies before they roast them, I’ll never know.
Generations later, two doctors are riding in a carriage to some type of medical convention. One of them is a young, hunky doc named Doctor Gorobec. His square jaw and full head of perfect hair immediately tags him as the dude that will be saving good princess Katia.
His mentor is an older looking dude named Dr. Kruvajan. His balding, wrinkled up face has us pegging him as “the friend who dies at the hands of the evil princess.”
Kruvajan wants to take a shortcut through the old, dark, and creepy forest. With a little bread greasing his palm, the driver takes the shortcut and promptly wrecks the carriage near some old ruins. While the driver sets about trying to figure out how to put the donut on his vehicle, the two doctors go off and explore the old ruined crypt that is nearby.
They notice that there’s this old tomb laying there that is just begging to be tampered with. Before you know it, these idiots have opened it up, taken the mask off of Asa, got cut on it and dripped blood on her body. Asa is awakened a little and it’s enough to also rouse her evil pal Prince Javutich, setting in motion a fairly predictable chain of events.
The doctors leave the crypt unaware of all the dumb things they have done and run smack dab into Princess Katia and her two hellhounds. She says that the crypt is in ruins because her dad is old and is too lazy to work around the house cleaning the garage, refinishing the deck, and keeping up the family crypt. She leaves, letting them know she lives in the spooky castle just up the way and to drop on by sometime if there’s a young, hunky doctor that wants to hook up with her.
Back at the castle, the resurrected Javutich is causing trouble, frightening Katia’s father into such a state that they send for a doctor. Javutich takes care of the real carriage driver sent for the doctor, picks up Kruvajan and takes him to the castle.
However, instead of taking him to see the sickly father, he takes him backstage to the crypt where Asa awaits him. She lures him into kissing her clammy, dead witch face (now with puncture wounds – you know from the mask of Satan and all!) and the next thing we know, the doctor is one of those vacant looking drones that speaks with no emotion and has developed a sudden aversion to crucifixes.
The rest of the movie is made up of your classic spooky castle gimmicks. Hidden levers, secret passageways, deathtraps, fights with resurrected corpses, hunky doctors mooning over starry-eyed princesses – they all get a good workout.
The final climatic confrontation with Asa is pretty anticlimactic. Her plan is to take over the body of Katia and she tries to trick Gorobec into thinking that she was Katia so that he would kill the real Katia, who was laying knocked out nearby.
But he tries the crucifix test on them and figures out which witch is which, and sits back and watches as the angry mob that has been suddenly formed storms the castle, and finishes the job on Asa that they started a couple of hundred years back. Katia comes to and gets a congratulatory hug from Gorobec.
Black Sunday looks great, but suffers from a lack of any interesting characters and its routine witch revenge story. The only thing we know about Gorobec is that he likes sexy babes and can’t hold his liquor. The only thing we know about Katia is that she likes hunky docs and resembles a vengeful ancestor who happens to be a witch.
If the story generated any suspense or contained a surprise or two, the characters wouldn’t have to carry the load as much. Bava’s Planet of the Vampires is a good example of this, but Black Sunday fails here as well. Maybe it got by on its couple of gory scenes forty years ago, but today’s jaded audience’s aren’t likely to be that impressed.
© 2011 MonsterHunter
