Alucarda

A young woman, sent to a convent by her father, is roomed with the mysterious, free-spirited Alucarda. Unfortunately, Alucarda is maybe a little too free-spirited and adventurous, and soon the girls are all caught up in a world of satanic rituals, orgies, torture, vampires, and gratuitous nudity.

Alucarda aims to be, I think, a sort of surreal, over-the-top, possibly intentionally campy expression of religious and sexual hysteria. The dream-like opening scenes, where the girls meet some weird hairy man in the woods and follow him to a castle no questions asked, showed a lot of promise as oddball entertainment. It keeps this weird tone going through the whole film, but that doesn't really prove to be enough. At some point, it just seems like, as ridiculous as the whole film is, it really needs to cut loose and bust out a crazy blood bath or something. Instead, it mostly feels like a film full of half measures; everything is all weird and tawdry, sure, with the sex and the torture and beheadings and stuff, but nothing crazy enough ever happens, and never for a sustained period of time. I guess shit does finally hit the fan at the very end, but by that point it was too little, too late. For such a strange, sleazy film, it could have benefited from a little less restraint.

Grade: C