I'm watching more gialli.
All the Colors of the Dark (1972)Starring Atra:
and TVC:
This is kind of a weird one. It starts out fairly normal: Jane is having nightmares after a car accident caused her to miscarry, she's got a boyfriend that's acting a bit shifty and is always gone on business trips, she thinks the man from her nightmares is stalking her but she's also afraid that she's becoming delusional. Okay, decent setup. Then she meets her new neighbor Mary who's like "You know what might cure those nightmares? Going to a black mass!" And now we are truly off to the races.
Jane goes with Mary to the black mass. Everything's going well right up to the point where the high priest sacrifices a dog, makes Jane drink the blood, and then rapes her.
Jane feels like her reality is starting to fracture, so she doesn't tell anyone about this. She briefly stops having the nightmares and starts feeling more upbeat, but then she sees the stalker again and has a panic attack. Mary convinces her to go back to the Satan cult one more time, and have sex with the high priest again and that she will be free from the nightmare once and for all. Jane does, but afterwards she learns that she is to become Mary's replacement in the cult and then she has to sacrifice Mary to complete her initiation. In a drug-induced delirium, she stabs a willing Mary and then faints. She wakes up later, hoping that it was only a nightmare, and is greeted by the high priest and the man from her nightmares (who it turns out is the cult's enforcer) who show her Mary's corpse to prove that it was not just a dream. She finds out that her mother and sister were both witches, and that she was always destined to become a witch too. She faints again and wakes up back at her apartment. She rushes to Mary apartment, only to discover that Mary never actually lived there, and that the apartment is owned by a little old lady who had left the apartment vacant for the past two weeks.
The last act of the movie is Jane running from the cult, the cult enforcer killing everyone that tries to help her, Jane losing her mind, and then the final twist...
spoiler (click to show/hide)
The cult didn't really exist, and was actually part of an elaborate scheme by her sister to get her half of the inheritance that she didn't know about. The shifty boyfriend was actually totally on the up-and-up and kills the sister after she tries to seduce him into her plan. The police arrest all the "cult" members, except for the high priest that Jane kills during a rooftop struggle. But Jane realizes the nightmares that she'd been having were actually premonitions, and that maybe her family really are witches.
Pretty wild ride. The last act is a little too mundane and the ending was a little too tidy, but I enjoyed it.
3/5
