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When a group of Satanic bikers – in league with a psychotic, hermaphrodite cult leader known as “Dr. Love” – enter a forest looking for victims, they unwittingly resurrect an ancient evil in the form of zombified cult members who committed mass suicide in those same woods over 200 years ago. Private investigator and Vietnam War deserter Jack Steele, along with an enigmatic professor and a rather unintelligent investigative reporter soon become entangled in the situation themselves, and must try to get away from these flesh-eating creatures and the madman who controls them.
Pleasures of the Damned is supposedly an Italian film made in 1979. The director was later brought up on 17 indecency charges and heavily fined. All copies of the film were supposedly destroyed, but in the mid-1990s several bootleg copies surfaced. This particular version has been restored to what the film was originally intended to be.
Content
These types of movies are very difficult to critique, because although the technical quality is really pretty horrible, that’s actually the point of the whole film. The most interesting part of Pleasures of the Damned, however, is the additional hook that it was originally a banned movie from the 1970s that was rediscovered and restored. This one thing may have elevated it just above most other horrible B-movies, as it adds an interesting twist that most normal viewers might actually find appealing.
The great advantage of purposefully doing a B-movie is that any technical problems that arise usually serve to enhance the look of the film. This proves to be very advantageous to many independent filmmakers, because they can make a film for almost dirt-cheap that a growing number of B-movie fans will absolutely love. After all, an audience who purposefully goes to see a movie like Pleasures of the Damned is not expecting to see Gone With the Wind, so the filmmakers can cut all the corners they want.
However, this hook doesn’t really play out, as there were a couple moments of inaccuracy that didn’t really fit the bill. This seemed to drag the film down from being a bad – but interesting – B-Movie into just rather sloppy filmmaking. First of all, the biggest question was: why was an Italian film set in the United States; and in Maryland at that? It seems as though it may have been a good idea to pick a small town in Italy for the film to be set in, or even just make one up, as this would have lent more believability to the film itself.
Visual Look
This movie had all that classic hallmarks of a truly horrible B-movie: bad white balancing and lighting, jerky and jumpy camera movements, replacing actors without doing re-shoots, bad sound effects and ADR, crossing the line, cheesy blood-and-gore effects, and numerous logic and story problems. Ed Wood would have been proud.
However, there were several things that, once again, pulled the movie away from its original intent. For instance, in the indoor scenes, there was plenty of 70’s-type memorabilia lying around, and the costumes (for the most part) looked pretty close to the era they were supposed to be representing.
But once the shooting moved outdoors, it became quite clear that this film had been shot in present day. This fact becomes most obvious when SUVs and passenger cars from the 1990s drive through the frame, modern houses can be seen in a lot of the outdoor shots, and – most obvious of all – the “biker gang” drives around in one of those boxy-looking Scions.
There were a couple other little things that bothered me, such as one point when the “Satanists” stand around a six-pointed Jewish star drawn on the floor, rather than around a pentagram. Also, the Professor – who is later seen wearing a robe with an upside-down cross on it – keeps hold of a “magic charm” that is supposed to protect him from evil. In a close-up shot of the medallion, I was amused to find that it was actually a medal with Pope John Paul II’s picture on it. However, both of these issues aren’t all that major, and usually result in giving the audience a good laugh.
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