Baba Yaga (1973)
The beauty of this job (and trust me - after a teeth-grinder like this one, it is most assuredly a job) is that you'll find yourself in some of the most bizarre of situations. Thus it is that I am forced to complain about something that I would have never thought myself capable of just a few short months ago: where the hell was Umberto Lenzi in this mess?
On the off chance you have a passing familiarity with junky Italian horror movies from the early seventies, you'll know that Umberto Lenzi (director of messy milestones such as Cannibal Ferox, Eaten Alive, and Nightmare City) has nothing to do with this movie. Then why am I babbling on about him here? You'll have to ask the unprofessional losers at the "you get what you pay for - almost" DVD company that is Diamond Entertainment.
You see, they have this movie out on DVD and for some reason steadfastly call it Kiss Me, Kill Me, even though the title on their wretched print (You say there's a bottomless pit in the house the witch lives in? I'll just have to take your word for it since the scene is so dark that I thought the witch forgot to pay her electric bill.) is clumsily inserted with a special effect that calls to mind the titles your dad would have put on the home video of your prom night back in 1985.
And if the bogused-up title isn't enough, at the bottom of the DVD cover are the words "An Umberto Lenzi Production". Well, I looked and there isn't anything on Umberto's resume that claims any credit for it and his resume isn't exactly the kind where he would be denying involvement to protect his reputation or family.
Flipping the DVD case over, you'll notice that the credits on the back sort of match up with a movie that Lenzi made back in 1969 (this is the year Diamond gives for Baba Yaga when it was really 1973) called So Sweet...So Perverse. They also claim that this movie runs 91 minutes, but all you're getting here is 81 minutes and I'll just have to assume that those missing minutes are what makes the difference between being the mildly incoherent and strongly uninteresting movie that it is and the arty giallo classic morons often try to claim it is.
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 with really cut abs.
I suppose those comic book origins explain why the opening credits (which due to the full frame presentation by Diamond you can't really make out all the way) involve some comic book pictures drawn by Guido. I think there was also some characters yammering about Guido and comic books at the beginning of the movie, but I was already hopelessly confused by the phantom Lenzi connection and set my face into the scowl that was the bane of all my grade school teachers.
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! Of course! That's a natural, I was thinking and smacked myself upside my acne-scarred head when this witch starting using the fashion model photographer's favorite camera to kill the people she was photographing! That was almost as awesome as when that telephone stalked that fashion model in Dial: Help. (In that movie, the phone killed the photographer so you can see how just by turning some standard genre conventions on their head, you can make a movie even worse than one about a killer phone - who'd have thought that was possible?)
So, you've got Valentina just 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 or something, 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? The seventies 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." I think that this is where Baba gives Valentina a doll. This is probably the only memorable bit of this movie. The doll is dressed up in some black leather harness that you would expect to see someone wearing in a Madonna video.
Once 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!). Then the cops show up and there's no trace of Baba Yaga, but there is a doll head laying around. The bottomless pit also turns out to be about three feet deep!
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. The movie is obviously hampered by the bargain basement presentation from Diamond Entertainment, but I think there's a reason why they are able to release this bogus version without anyone really caring.
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 (seemingly confined to stealing bits of undergarments and animating strangely-clad dolls). The dream business doesn't work because the rest of the movie is already like a dream - nonsensical and something you can't seem to wake up from and 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.