SO SWEET, SO DEAD (1972)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological*

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

I saw this film under the title THE SLASHER IS THE SEX MANIAC. For once an exploitative and inaccurate English title is derived from an Italian title that's equally inaccurate though a little less exploitative (see above). I prefer the alternate English title for this film, the only giallo by director/co-writer Roberto Bianchi Montero.

SO SWEET SO DEAD comes damn close to rating "good mythicity" by the way the script utilizes tropes of misogyny. I'm not talking about the penchant of giallos to depict more female killings in disproportion to male ones. Due to the strength discrepancy between men and women, there's a degree of physical logic when a male serial killer-- or even a female one-- preys more on females than on males. Even the depiction of female deaths in spectacular visual terms can be defended as illustrative of a misogynistic outlook.

But in SWEET, we have a killer who incarnates a social form of misogyny, rather than killing because he's a "sex maniac." Perhaps because the murderer dresses in the standard black giallo attire with a stocking mask and uses a mundane knife all the time, the press doesn't give him a snazzy nickname. Thus I'll anticipate the film's Big Reveal by calling him "the Professor" (yes, that's why the spoilers are there). He earns that name by showing a professorial level of research ability. All of his targets are all glamorous, upper-class married women who have cheated on their husbands, and the Professor first kills the women and then leaves behind photographic evidence on their indiscretions. He also very considerately scratches out the faces of the men with whom the unfaithful women dallied, as if he were avenging the husbands who were sinned against and yet excusing the men who made the indiscretions possible. In hands more capable than those of Montero, this could have been a searing indictment of Italian double standards toward male profligacy. But one of the big flaws of SWEET is that the Professor's psychosis is never really justified. Yes, there's some last-minute BS about how he lost his beloved wife because she died in an accident while in the company of her lover. Yet the weak script makes no attempt to grapple with his reasons for protecting the male transgressors. Ironically, when the Professor in his civilian ID is trying to lead the cops down the garden path, he suggests that the killer effaces the photos because he's homosexual-- which is also BS.

The Professor's main adversary, Inspector Capuana (Farley Granger) is a little better drawn. He and his beautiful wife Barbara (Sylva Koscina) moved from a small Italian city to a bigger one for the sake of social advancement. But because the Professor targets only rich people, Capuana constantly finds himself between a rock and a hard place. Rich people constantly demand that the inspector arrest the malefactor preying on their class (even if the killer IS knocking off unfaithful wives), but at the same time the cops have to treat all the rich people with kid gloves. After three or four women die, Capuana gets a break, of sorts. Gastone is a somewhat dotty mortician (played by Luciano Rossi as if he were channeling Klaus Kinski). Gastone, though not a suspect, seems to have a fetish for making dead bodies look flawlessly preserved. Out of nowhere the mortician confesses to the killings. Capuana and his fellow cops don't believe Gastone for a moment, but they tell the press they've caught the killer, in the far-fetched belief that this will offend the killer's pride.

This stratagem shouldn't work, but it does. The Professor calls Capuana and announces that he'll make the inspector pay for insulting the killer's holy mission, for the Professor then tells Capuana that he intends to slay Barbara. Apparently the killer's annoyance allows him to deviate from focusing on the upper classes, but he stays true to his main obsession, for he also tells Capuana that Barbara's been cheating on him.

Even though Capuana never actually sees any evidence against Barbara, he implicitly believes everything the murderer tells him. (And how convincing are a bunch of photos with the male faces scratched off, anyway?) But though Capuana still has no way to track the Professor, he has a sudden realization of just who Barbara's lover could be. He rushes to Barbara's rendezvous point.

I'll omit the movie's final twist, which could have been a Hitchcockian masterpiece if Montero hadn't saddled SWEET with such cardboard characters and unbelievable motivations. Frankly, the Professor is such a weak-sauce monster that I really wish Gastone had been the culprit. His obsession with making women look beautiful in death-- and thus incapable of refusing any attentions-- could have been a nice comment on the way the better giallos use the female body to portray a union of eros and thanatos, of "the sweet" and "the dead."

TRICK OR TREAT, SCOOBY DOO (2022)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*

TRICK OR TREAT, SCOOBY DOO is so bad, it made me yearn for the sublimity of 2020's SCOOB. Whatever the various failings of that DTV flick, at least there were indications that the writers had some regard for the history of the Scooby franchise specifically and for Hanna-Barbera generally.

I have no idea how director/co-writer Audie Harrison finagled this assignment. His credit to fame thus far is that of writing and producing several episodes of the Cartoon Network show UNCLE GRANDPA, which I didn't care for but which did enjoy five seasons. But he and his co-writers were clearly out to "deconstruct" the Scooby Gang, and some dumdum in management let them indulge themselves.

The main plot follows a trope seen in early comic books: the Big Reveal that a bunch of completely separate villains actually share some common history: a mystery mastermind, or a supplier of weapons-- or, in this case, costumes. After many years in which Mystery Incorporated exposed dozens of monster masqueraders and put them in prison, Velma suddenly comes across enough clues to deduce a common maker of monster-costumes: the fiendish fashionista Coco Diablo. The Scoobies put her away as well, despite the way Velma forms a near-immediate crush on the imperious, glasses-wearing mastermind.

The Scoobies go through lean times now that there's no one to make monster-outfits for devious dastards. But then they're attacked by spectral beings that seem to be 19th-century parallels of all five Scoobies. Are they real monsters, or more phonies? The only way the mystery-loving teens can cope is to talk the warden of Coolsville Prison to parole Coco Diablo in order to help them solve the conundrum. But does Coco have her own agenda?

The answers to all these questions are uniformly boring, like the minor arcs of the characters. Daphne doesn't know what purpose she serves in the group. Fred's life is fundamentally empty if he can't trap monsters. Shaggy and Scooby just want to binge on Halloween candy. 

And then there's Velma. The lesbian do-over of her character is banal, but the script's one virtue of the script is that this schtick doesn't get built up into some vast endorsement of toxic feminism, as one can find in the Meretricious Cinematic Universe. So it's silly, but harmless. 

The animation and voice-work are OK, but nothing special. One odd aspect of TRICK is that the teens visit the Coolsville Prison a few times, which seems to be wholly occupied by all of their old foes, attired in orange jumpsuits. At the end of the flick, all of the villains get loose, but they don't get to re-assume their costumed identities-- which is the only thing that might have injected a small treat into this boring trick-show. 

HELL COMES TO FROGTOWN (1988)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, psychological, sociological*

In my latest viewing of this prime cut of delicious pulp meat, I noticed that at the end of the credits, the filmmakers pay homage to four directors. All were veterans of the Golden Age of Serials, and all four worked on one of the three FLASH GORDON serials. 

In the last interview of FROGTOWN's late co-director Donald G. Jackson, he mentions his affection for serials generally and the character of Flash Gordon as one of the many "superheroes" he likes. The director doesn't mention the credit-sequence, so it could just as easily have been the contrivance of his co-writer Randall Frakes. Jackson does mention that Frakes tended to inject much more sexuality into his scripts than did Jackson, and so it may be that the homage was code for FROGTOWN's continuity with both the lusty tone of the early Alex Raymond comic strip and at least the first of the Gordon serials.

I don't think many SF apoca-flicks are as obsessively focused on sex as FROGTOWN. Even MAD MAX FURY ROAD, which also uses the same trope of trying to re-populate the decimated world with a coterie of fertile women, is positively abstemious by comparison. In fact, I prefer the way Jackson and Frakes represent their hero Sam Hell (Roddy Piper) as a raffish, self-interested "thief and scavenger" who just happens to have the devil's charm with respect to seducing women AND a high sperm count. So the remnants of the American government (never seen) empower Medtech, a unit of all-female military physicians, to bring Sam together with as many fertile ladies as possible.

However, the apocalypse spawned a race of bipedal, intelligent frog-people, who inhabit the titular Frogtown. The froggies' leader Commander Toty (strangely, not "toady") has taken a group of fertile women prisoner. One might think Medtech would not risk their sperm-bearing prisoner by making him join a mission to liberate the breeding stock, but one would be wrong. Further, they also place Sam's gonads in peril by outfitting him with a shock-codpiece to ensure his obedience to the unit-commander, Lieutenant Spangle (Sandahl Bergman).

Of course the entire rescue-mission farrago is designed to force a tough hero and a tough heroine into constant propinquity. Every time Sam gets out of line, Spangle plays the ultimate "punishing female" by zapping his balls-- though, not paradoxically, she wants them for her own use, even though implicitly she's not able to breed like the women she's rescuing. The trip to Frogtown is so rife with tongue-in-cheek foreplay between the two that it's as much fun as the main adventure.

Since Frogtown is male-dominated, Spangle is obliged to reverse her "domme" status and to become the subservient property of her "owner" Sam. This plan goes south when Commander Toty takes Spangle prisoner for some interspecies intercourse and consigns Sam to a torture chamber. Sam, even after escaping the torturer, also has to deal with a female froggie who's warm for his manly form. Sam rescues Spangle-- who, in fairness, does her share of ass-kicking-- and in due time the fertile girls are saved as well. There are some minor plots with a traitor-human selling arms to the batrachian "Indians" and Sam meeting an old friend, a prospector named Looney Tunes (western actor Rory Calhoun), but they're adeptly handled, never slowing down the main plot, which is the romance of alpha-dogs Sam and Spangle. 

FROGTOWN provides both Piper and Bergman with their best acting-roles, in large part because it gives them so much opportunity for comedy. Bergman even gets to show up a little of her terpsichorean talents as Toty makes Spangle execute the "Dance of the Three Snakes." Even the crappiness of the costumes for the mutant frog-people-- not believable in any way-- contribute to the humor. I suppose fans of Piper's wrestling-career might be disappointed that he mostly fights with guns in FROGTOWN, but that lack didn't bother me. I've seen the movie's two sequels and found them utterly forgettable, which is a testimony to the strength of the Jackson-Frakes script. 

TOTALLY SPIES!: THE MOVIE (2009)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

One year before Disney issued its "high school spy-girl" TV series KIM POSSIBLE, Television Francaise got there first with the antic adventures of Alex, Sam and Clover in TOTALLY SPIES. When the French series reached American shores in translated form, it enjoyed a good measure of popularity. Allegedly the show still may come out with more episodes, but in 2009 the studio released this movie, which serves as something of an origin for the comic spy-girls.

The three teen girls don't know each other as they're due to enter their freshman years at a Beverly Hills high school. However, they just happen to cross paths in a shopping mall when the super-secret agency WOOHP decides that the three untrained teens need to have their superspy potential tested. Without even intending to audition, Sam, Clover and Alex pass the test, which involves the girls having to "log roll" atop a colossal sushi roll.

WOOHP commander Jerry Lewis, an older balding man, strongarms the teens into accepting membership in the agency, which includes their getting trained in martial arts and donning colorful spandex uniforms. Jerry alludes to a mission involving "mysterious disappearances," but the script spends over half an hour acclimatizing the young women to their double life as superspies and as high school freshmen. The good girls have their first run-in with "mean girl" Mandy, their continuing school nemesis from the series. The heroines also meet a domineering principal, Mrs. Skritch, who harasses the girls but must be written out at the movie's end because she's not in the series proper. (Skritch does contribute to one of the few funny high-school jokes, when the girls avoid her while dancing to "Walk Like an Egyptian.") 

Finally the main plot gets going, and it concerns a mysterious mastermind who is brainwashing young people with a device called "the Fabulizer." The spy girls track their enemy to his orbiting space station and learn that the evildoer is failed fashion-model Fabu, who plans to eliminate most of Earth's population to promote his "fashion paradise" of brainwashed subjects. The girls get initially trounced by Fabu's henchman Yuri and captured. A male WOOHP agent also sneaks aboard the satellite, but he's willing to let the girls go hang so that he can get the credit for taking down the mastermind. However, in a surprising development, wimpy looking Fabu outfights the WOOHP agent. However, the teen spies break free, clobber both Yuri and Fabu, and save the world before returning to their usual school routine.

I grade the mythicity in SPIES "fair" just because the writers keep the silly situations focused on the fads of 21st-century youth culture. A fair number of jokes land, and the animation is colorful and lively given its TV-level origins, so SPIES is worth a look if one is in the mood for this sort of farce. 

INTERZONE (1987)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, sociological*

There's so little dialogue in the first hour of INTERZONE that next to this post-apoc serving, MAD MAX comes off like a Woody Allen talkfest. Did director Deran Serafian lose his sound equipment during part of the shoot?

Regardless, the basic conflict has practically been xeroxed from Apocalypse Moviemaking 101. Once again there's one society of vicious savages (though for once they're all on foot, with no exotic vehicles) and another society of peaceniks (though for once the society's leaders can defend themselves fairly well). This is shown in an early scene when the raiders of muscle-bound leader Mantis (Teagan Clive) attack the peaceniks with heavy gunfire, and the peaceniks just sneer at the bad guys from behind a psychic shield.

Nevertheless, the peaceniks need the help of a macho dude, one Swan (Bruce Abbott), to help them acquire a legendary treasure in the forbidden terrain of the Interzone. The raiders want it too, because they think the treasure is some great weapon from the era before nuclear destruction. I'm going to flagrantly spoil what is one of the worst "reveals" in the history of movies, because the "treasure" is a recording that-- tells the characters how the war happened. In other words, the "big reveal" is the sort of thing almost every post-apoc flick reveals to the viewers in an opening monologue.

Bruce Abbott brings a breezy charm to his tough-guy role despite the fact that Swan is a nothing character, much like his bland love interest, a slave girl employed by the peaceniks, but who barely has anything to do. Only Teagan Clive's scenes provide some spark, as Mantis first seduces Swan and then forces him to fight an underground monster. The climax includes a hand-to-hand fight between Swan and Mantis, and Swan gets the worst of it until the villainess, after nearly knocking Swan's block off, obligingly walks away from the fight to do something else, allowing the hero to blow her away. I must admit that this one scene makes INTERZONE a bit more memorable than a lot of humdrum apoca-flicks, but not until 1990 would director Serafian produce a decent action-movie in the Van Damme vehicle DEATH WARRANT. Amusingly, INTERZONE's other two writers were the terminally awful team of Claudio Fragasso and Rosella Drudi, who would also have one great cinematic moment scripting the "so bad it's awesome" TROLL 2, also in 1990.

VAMPIRE KNIGHTS (1988), GIRLFRIEND FROM HELL (1989)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: (1) *poor,* (2)*fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*

Some journeymen directors manage to work out reasonably long careers in the business without distinguishing themselves. Others enjoy much shorter careers, but somehow manage to grind out one interesting film before taking their talents elsewhere. Obviously, the latter are much easier to sum up due to fewer flicks to analyze. For instance, it didn't take me long to run through the four metaphenomenal films of Richard Cunha on this blog, but the three I didn't care for take on a little luster from the one I did like (which was, to be specific, the pulpy SHE DEMONS).

Unlike Cunha, Daniel Peterson is still alive and working, and I've no information on his post-1980s work, which includes shorts, TV episodes and some very obscure films. So I won't do any sort of overview on Peterson's career, but just compare and contrast his two 1980s films-- one bad and one good,

VAMPIRE KNIGHTS looks much like a botched student film. There aren't but four sets and a little driving around in a car, and only two or three of the performers had anything like professional movie careers. As the title slightly suggests, this is a vampire comedy, but the script, solely credited to director Peterson, includes only one or two decent jokes. The whole package suggests no talent whatever.

Two young guys, Tom and Bobbie, hope to score at a local party, and they try to talk their buddy Ken from going along. Ken would rather sit at home and watch some direct-access show in which the host shows horror movies and tries to sell memberships in a "Vampire Knights" club he sponsors. Ken (played by one of the few actors in the film with a modest career, Ken Abraham) apparently believes vampires are real, but eventually his friends talk him into partying.

On the way to the party, the three guys pick up a good-looking female hitchhiker. After a little badinage, she turns into a blue-faced wolf-ghoul, but just as she does, the driver hits the brakes for other reasons, causing the monster-woman to fly out the van's back door-- without any of the guys noticing what happened to her. This remains the general level of the humor.

The guys attend the party, see one girl displaying a little boob, and meet three chicks from Transylvania who just "flew in." The girls-- two aggressive vamps and one rather passive one-- target the trio for blood-bags. But even though the lady vamps have already killed a couple of victims at the party, they become apprehensive because Ken boasts about being a Vampire Knight. This apparently causes the girls to decide they'd better suss these guys out, even though the guys convey no impression of being anything but simple goofballs on the make. The girls meet the guys back at their place, and soon Bobbie and Tom get turned into vamp-chow. Ken inadvertently charms the shy vampire, and she ends up helping him kill the other two. 

There are only two points of interest here. One concerns vampire-movie mythology, in that it's standard to picture male vampires as super-strong, but not so much the female of the species. Peterson does have a scene in which the lead vamp-girl (Robin Stille, who also appeared in a handful of pro films) beats up Ken twice, only to die because she doesn't kill him right away. The other point is the movie's one good joke, wherein the guy on Ken's TV tries to wheedle money out of viewers after the fashion of Oral Roberts. But all the rest is tedium.

Yet, within the next year, Peterson came out with a wholly professional effort, GIRLFRIEND FROM HELL, which as one might guess is the film on his resume I consider a standout.

Is GIRLFRIEND a great film, even as a wacky supernatural comedy? No. But the improvement after VAMPIRE KNIGHTS is positively exponential. The main actors are all professionals. The sets, while limited, don't look repulsively cheap, and the wardrobe is more impressive. And there's actually a tiny psychological motif related to "the war between men and women."

Whereas KNIGHTS just had three random vampire girls killing victims, almost all of the female characters have an unusual aggressiveness. As in KNIGHTS the activity coalesces around a party being given by teens Alice and Rocco, a couple best described by Rocco's line to Alice; "You've been hitting me a lot harder lately." Diane (Lezlie Deane) talks a shy friend, Maggie (Liane Curtis), into attending the party, where Diane will meet with her boyfriend and introduce Maggie to a blind date. 

However, two supernatural entities choose to attend as well. The first is billed only as "The Devil," though this devil is innately feminine. The Devil possesses Maggie, turning her into a "Miss Hyde" who drags Diane, Diane's boyfriend and the blind date into dangerous situations, like almost running down a bunch of nuns with a van. (The nuns respond by pulling out heavy firearms and shooting at the vehicle.) Returning to the party, Demon Maggie begins using her powers to wreak weird transformations on the unfortunate young people.

Then the second entity arrives, in pursuit of the Devil. This is Chaser (Dana Ashbrook), a goofy "angel" who's in charge of trying to chase down the Devil and exorcise her when she possesses people. Chaser however is far from angelic; he's a horndog who'll make a pass at any nubile woman he sees, including Diane and Demon Maggie. To further complicate things, Chaser and the Devil had a fling before he knew who she was. Thus the ensuing slapstick violence that dominates the film is mostly about women getting furious at dorky guys.

Though Curtis and Deane are both good, Ashbrook holds the flick together with his energetic portrait of an oversexed would-be lothario who only carries out his exorcism duties because that's his heavenly assignment. Most of the jokes land well enough for this type of film, even though the very inferior KNIGHTS almost provides a plot-template for GIRLFRIEND. (Like KNIGHTS, this movie has just one short booby-shot.) Unlike KNIGHTS, Peterson does work in an amusing sequence wherein Chaser and Diane get bounced around to different time-frames by Chaser's malfunctioning teleport-device. This stunt helps to distract from the majority of scenes taking place in and around one big house-set. 

The film ends with Maggie getting safely exorcised, remembering nothing of her walk on the wild side. The Devil escapes into the ether again. Chaser is obliged to pursue her again, though not without getting one last sock in the schnozz from Diane, who irrationally sympathizes with the Devil after hearing how Chaser mistreated her. There were a lot of goony comedies in the 1980s, but this one, while no classic, deserves to be better known.

RING OF DARKNESS (1979)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, psychological*

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

An alternative title for this Italian demon-tale is SATAN'S WIFE. But the story's true focus is actually the devil's daughter, and there are four "wives" in the story, though three of them are minor support-characters. Writer-director Piero Carpi adapted RING, one of just four cinematic works he worked on, from his own novel, UN' OMBRA NELL' OMBRA. The title has been translated as "The Shadow Within the Shadow," and this in turn begat the alternate name for the film, RING OF DARKNESS. I find this title the more appropriate one. Unlike a lot of Italian EXORCIST rip-offs, RING's low-key horrors seem to suggest a Manichean world, where good and evil are locked in constant battle. An early scene features an agnostic professor prating about how the white and black pieces in chess represent just such a struggle, and he sounds by no means totally committed to the "white" side.

The film opens on a Satanic sabbat, with nude men and women having an orgy, and four of the women have sex with Satan himself. There's a brief mention that they do so with the idea of gaining some temporal power, but when we see them twelve or so years later, the women just seem to be middle-class wives of no particular distinction. All are still glamorous, being played by Irene Papas, Marisa Mell, Valentine Cortese, and Anne Heywood. While other children are mentioned, only the daughter of Heywood's character Carlotta is central to the plot. Said scion is Daria (Lara Wendel), and though she's been raised to think herself the daughter of Peter Rhodes (whom Carlotta's divorced at the opening of the main story), it's clear that Daria intuits her true heritage somehow.

Daria shows contempt for everyone she encounters-- Carlotta, her teacher (the Cortese character) and fellow middle school students. She doesn't perform any EXORCIST-style magic early on, but she predicts that an airplane carrying her false father Peter will crash, and it does, though it's never definite that Daria causes the crash. But a little later Daria responds to a male student's attentions by searing her hand-print in his chest-- though for some reason this doesn't kill him.

Carlotta enlists the aid of her fellow Satanists to find some way to purge Daria of her Satanic nature, which marks a contrast with THE EXORCIST in that Daria's never literally demon-possessed. The Middle-Aged Satan-Society also calls upon the services of a young Catholic priest (John Philip Law). Despite the holy man's doubts about his calling (paging Father Karras) he helps the women create a strange artifact that I *think* is supposed to look like a blood-colored wafer. (Combining both the blood and body of Christ, perhaps.) 

Carlotta then uses the wafer in a ritual of exorcism, one that Carpi almost certainly whipped out of his own imagination. At the home shared by mother and daughter, Carlotta creates a mystic circle and begins reading magical incantations. Daria sneers at her mother's efforts, but they work at first, forcing the young girl to enter the circle. Carlotta almost gets her daughter to eat the wafer, and for some reason the spell also causes Daria's clothes to disappear. But the devil-daughter's power ascends and nude Daria struggles over the wafer with Carlotta in her ceremonial robes. It's not much of a "fight," even assuming that the females are still battling on some occult level. Daria burns Carlotta's hands but does not kill her mother, and that's the last we see of injured Carlotta. Then, in one of the most anti-climactic climaxes in horror flicks, Daria simply hails a taxi and mesmerizes the driver into taking her, sans pay, to the Sistine Chapel. Daria then just stand there, dreaming a demon's dreams for the fate of Christianity, at least in its Catholic manifestation-- and the film ends.

Returning to the question of influence, Carpi claimed that he wrote his novel before the 1971 publication of Blatty's EXORCIST, and that's at least possible, though sources assert that OMBRA wasn't published until 1974. However, Ira Levin's ROSEMARY'S BABY was published in 1967, and Carpi didn't expressly say he took no influence from that work. In some ways, RING seems more like a response to the Levin work, but altered so that the lady Satanists willingly enter into their Satanic bargain. Without access to the novel, I can't be sure, but he might have simply imported a few EXORCIST tropes into his original schema.

One of the more anti-EXORCIST motifs is Carpi's concentration on feminine power. Though the Blatty novel and subsequent film adaptation begin with a conflict between a mother and her demon-possessed daughter, the true battle takes place between two male Catholic priests and the implicitly male demon. In RING, Lucifer spreads his seed to create Daria and possibly other offspring, and the script actually states that none of his mortal "wives" enjoys sex any more, though without specifying why (at least in the dubbed version). But he never appears in the main story. None of the other male figures except the priest have any real agency, and even the priest's use of his holy power is directed by the magical knowledge of the Satanic sisterhood. Not that I'm claiming Carpi was any sort of feminist. His proximate reason for concentrating on the female characters may have been motivated by selling glamour and a little nudity. But there is a school of Christian thought that equates femininity with primeval, even pagan darkness, so perhaps the barely articulated theme of RING is that women unleash the ultimate darkness on humankind by their intercourse with the Devil.

On a minor closing note, Carpi wrote a lot more prose novels and Italian comics than he ever did film scripts. And one of the comics he allegedly wrote for was DIABOLIK-- which in 1967 got an outstanding film adaptation starring two of the performers in RING: John Philip Law and Marisa Mell.