Maria (Marian Hedman) has recently died, yet her influence lives on in the family and friends she has left behind. As her body lies out for them to pay their last respects this night, a strange feeling of dread falls upon those assembled, and when her daughter Miria (Jacqueline Dupré) wanders into the room you could hear a pin drop. That's not what happens, though, as the corpse suddenly sits up, making Miria scream out loud: don't worry, says the doctor, she is really dead, but the events of the next couple of days may well prove him wrong...
Well, she is dead, but her spirit lives on in this slow riff on the old Exorcist themes, actually a remake of a hardcore horror effort called Malabimba, and by hardcore I don't mean the frights were extreme, I mean there was actual footage of sexual intercourse inserted into the film. This one is more tame in that respect, although there are rumours that a similarly racy version exists, but the sex here mostly centres around the three actresses who appeared taking their clothes off and occasionally writhing around in a state of erotic ecstacy, like you do when you've just seen a dead body of someone you know.
Wait, what? No, of course you don't do that, but the people in this film do because of Maria's infernal influence, which is connected in some way to Satanism. We know this because there is an actual Satanist hanging about, and when he's not biting chickens he's trying to lift the stranglehold the deceased Maria has over her innocent daughter, who she is now trying to possess from beyond the grave. Only it would be from beyond the grave if she had been buried, it's just that there is no great urgency to even place the body in a coffin, never mind stick it six feet under, so it tends to lie about naked on a stone slab in the dungeon-like basement.
Could it be that Maria's evil spirit is ensuring that nobody wants to go through with any funeral? Or could it be that the script was so vaguely assembled that nobody was that bothered whether this film made any sense of not. I'm going to plump for the latter, as the plotline alternates between spooky scenes and nudity, with a crossover occuring every so often when we find out that Miria is taken over by her mother to seduce and/or murder various of the guests in the house. So, for example the doctor is taken aback when that body appears to spring to life and attempt to remind him that he was in love with her before she died.
Which leads to the poor old doc keeling over and popping his clogs, naturally, although nobody seems to notice when one of the characters simply isn't around any more, or if they do they don't consider calling the police or an ambulance or whatever, and carry on as they were, indeed as if they had nothing else to do except snipe at each other. As much as The Exorcist, there's a Cat and the Canary mood to this as well, although with a different outcome that leans heavily on the supernatural. Erstwhile sleaze favourite Mariangela Giordano essays the role of the novice nun - she was in the first version of this as well - but as with much of this film doesn't get the chance to do anything especially outrageous, nothing that you wouldn't see in any number of softcore flicks anyway, and the overall impression is of a listless mope through uninspired schlock conventions. Music by Nico Catanese.
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