I went into 1974’s Night of the Sorcerers completely blind. Given how bad this film is, it is obvious I need to start doing some research before watching just any old thing.
There’s a company logo at the start of the picture I haven’t seen before, and that was for Victory Films. I assume the victory was one where good taste was defeated. This is an outrageously trashy feature.
It opens in the fictional country of Bumbasa, which apparently is somewhere in Africa. It is 1901, and a tribe has abducted a white woman dressed in a manner that screams “prim school teacher”. Her arms are tied to separate trees and the chief whips her. Each lash tears off another article of clothing, as if she’s in a tawdrier version of Devo’s “Whip It” video. Then he rapes her before ritualistically cutting off her head.
White, pith-helmeted soldiers arrive too late to prevent her death. Still, they mow down the natives in a hail of gunfire vastly more voluminous than I thought was possible using guns of the time. Thus the L.A. police force was born.
Then the white woman’s severed head turns to the camera and her mouth opens, exposing fangs. At least I can say the movie showed me something I have never seen before. Never mind how ridiculous this is.
And yet the movie will go one step further, when she shows up later with her head reattached to her body. She is supposedly now a leopard woman–a big cat by day and some sort of vampire at night. We barely see her (or the other leopard women later in the film) in feline form, aside from some deeply unconvincing fake leopard masks in the bushes. When they resume human form at night, they move in slow motion amid a lot of mist, as if there are in a heavy metal music video from the 1980’s.
One thing we do see a great deal of is female skin. There’s enough of it that I wondered why they just didn’t go ahead and make a hardcore pornographic film. At least that would deliver some satisfaction, as this is a complete failure as a horror movie.
I may love the female form, but I find it irritating when a film shows us so much of it that it starts to become ordinary. What a terrible thing to do, to diminish the stimulating effect of the female breast. I call this phenomenon “The Showgirls Effect”.
Most of the movie takes place in what was then the present day, but it never leaves Bumbasa. A professor and his students have arrived to do a documentary on endangered animals. Also in tow is the spoiled daughter of the guy funding the expedition.
But there’s little point in talking about any of the characters, as none of them have any real motivation or agency. All the women will be naked at different points in the film, until they are inevitably converted into leopard women. The few men are useless in preventing the women from getting victimized. One of those guys is played by Simon Andreu, who is slightly less annoying here than in any of the three Luciano Ercoli movies I just happened to recently watch on a Giallo box set.
Night of the Sorcerers is a terrible movie, one I couldn’t even appreciate on the level of camp. There is some amusement to be found in severed heads glaring into the camera and snarling. But the film is largely tedious, which is all the stranger given the extensive amount of female skin on display. Rarely has a movie with this much nudity been this boring. Avoid at all costs.
Dir: Amando de Ossorio
Starring…starring…[delirious laughter]…yeah…stars
Watched on Shout Factory blu-ray