– XXX is the latest weekly column in Celluloid Dimension featuring the hottest and naughtiest side of cinema. –
Directed by Andrea Bianchi
Written by Piero Regnoli
Starring:
- Katell Laennec as Bimba Caroli
- Patrizia Webley as Nais
- Enzo Fisichella as Andrea Caroli
- Giuseppe Marrocco as Adolfo Caroli
- Elisa Mainardi as The Medium
- Giancarlo Del Duca as Giorgio
Rating: 
Pure concupiscence all’italiana. The sort of artsy provocation that doesn’t make the slightest bit of sense or even meet the minimum requirements to be taken seriously as good narrative cinema, and yet it is, and I’m not quite sure how it manages to render such rambling material practicable enough to behave like an actual movie with framework and all, but I reiterate once again, it does, and wonderfully so.
Only a horror pornographer like Andrea Bianchi and a master of Euro Trash like Piero Regnoli could have conceptualized this orgasmic tableau of diabolical horniness and made it into one hell of an exceptional gothic possession porno flick. The decadence of the aristocracy – as if Visconti had infected Bianchi’s camera with his social cynicism – and high-flown blasphemy possess the centuries-old castle of a noble Italian family after a séance unleashes inferno (and nymphomania) on the holy decorous domesticity of an ancestral lineage facing an economic and moral crisis. A forbidding dark ancient spirit aims to debauch what little decorum survives in this privileged household; after a botched attempt to possess the family’s private nun, the sexually berserk ghost finds in the harmless figure of the family’s youngest, the childish 16-year-old Bimba (Katell Laennec), a more possessable virginal flesh to carry out the disruptive perversities it has in store for all members of the family. It’s a depravity-filled tragic melodrama, but a melodrama, nonetheless.
A bit of incest here and there, plenty of carnal solicitation and the steamiest sex scene with a teddy bear ever seen in the history of cinema, Andrea Bianchi delivers what I believe to be his most unseemly direction. And with that immodest approach in mind, he hybridizes the sequential monotony of pornography and the ethereal histrionic grotesquerie of a horror melodrama; it’s such an unholy combo. One that pushes the mechanic platitudes of the possession genre to scandalous proportions. And in those unbridled extremes, Malabimba has the commendable faculties to engage in as much pathos and catharsis as any other staid, non-porno drama.
The proliferation of kinky coital set pieces – each with their respective hardcore porn inserts, fellatio included – comprise virtually the entire premise of Malabimba’s storytelling, and admittedly can be seen as overdone to the extent of redundancy. However, the insistence on depicting these licentious pursuits adds cadence and mood to a film that would otherwise have been simply shapeless. That is the beauty of Malabimba’s gothic porno exploitation, even though it dramatizes its totality through sex and the awkwardness of it, it has shape – a beginning and an end that requires that sex-possessed perversion to have a directionality.
Yet no matter how sturdy the highly effective partnership of Bianchi on direction and Regnoli on script may be, this kind of bravura Italian rip-off of The Exorcist would not have been as compulsively watchable as it is if not for its well-cast, libertine performances. Voluptuous Patrizia Webley playing the pervy wife of Adolfo, the wealthiest of the family who is a paralytic, is a sweaty masterstroke. Enzo Fisichella as the repressed widower husband, and Bimba’s fretful father at the beginning appears to be the last ethical bastion within a rotten household, and that’s the most wickedly diverting thing to witness, as his fiercely possessed daughter and his brother’s sleazy wife drive him to fall prey to his sins. Katell Laennec is terrific too, but it is the character’s dialectical passion for eroticism rather than her performance that bestows an iconoclastic mystique to her incarnation of the metaphorical basics of the possession genre regarding the sexual awakening of an adolescent girl. That makes her innocent transgression hauntingly unforgettable by becoming the controversial, aggressively promiscuous and immoral character who pursues the sacrilegious in order to assault the pristine.
To deem it radical is an understatement, this is among the most relentlessly entertaining horror pornos ever made. I mean if watching a possessed young lady performing some 69 action with a Christmas plushie equates to rock solid Euro Sleaze fun for you, then yes, by all means, it’s one of the best. If not, avoid it at all costs.