We live in a wondrous new world, where bizarro fancies like Tragic Ceremony actually get mainstream releases by genuine media companies, and sold in real stores. The thing of it is, though, that in the trade we lost a little something. Find some unknown movie in the back pages of the poorly photocopied Luminous Film and Video Wurks catalog and you can claim to have discovered something, it's yours. Pick that same movie up in studio-master-quality as a whim purchase while in the Best Buy checkout lane, and you're just the guest to somebody else's discovery. What you gain in picture quality and commercial legitimacy is lost in excitement. The movie needs to bring much more to the party to keep you happy.
Riccardo Freda's Tragic Ceremony was once a treasured find, but without the thrill of discovery one must wonder what all the fuss was about. The first half of the film is standard issue horror traditions, indifferently presented. A group of hippies are enjoying a day trip to the countryside (because that's what those dirty hippies get up to, don'tcha know). Poor little rich boy Bill has a dysfunctional family that could have made a fine movie all by themselves. His working class pal Joe and guitarist Fred round out the group, along with flowerchild Jane (Camille Keaton), ostensibly Joe's squeeze but prepared to swing into a freelove-love triangle with Bill if the right moment presents. But before Bill can move his romantic fantasies into gear, the group is attacked by cliches: on a dark and stormy night, they run out of gas, and seek shelter in the spooky old mansion of Lord Alexander. Director Freda makes sure we know when to be scared, duly punctuating ooky moments with wide-angle distortions and thunderclaps (thanks for the hint, Ricky!) Freda has plenty of reasons to trump out the stylistic tricks once the kids settle into stately Alexander Manor, because their hosts are staging a Black Mass: like all good Satanists, they're well-stocked up on organ music, incense, and Dracula capes. Exercising some arcane power over Jane's mind, the cape crowd summons her to their lair, where Lady Alexander (Thunderball's Luciana Paluzzi) intends to plunge a ceremonial blade into Jane's chest. Her boyfriends rush to her rescue; chaos ensues. Cue the diffusion filters and tempera paint blood for an orgy of silly gore. Enjoy that head-splitting effect? Hope so, because it's coming back for seconds, thirds, etc.
Up until this point, the movie has been channeling Edgar Ulmer's The Black Cat or Don Sharp's Kiss of the Vampire. Once it explodes into a blood-soaked climax, at merely the halfway point, the story takes a sharp turn into the loopy world of Italian horror delerium. If you like your horror served up with a heaping stew of illogic and insanity, your patience will be rewarded. All pretense to character consistency or believable motivation is summarily abandoned, cause and effect unhook, and plot points previously established with care are simply ignored. This is a film that takes as a basic assumption that a woman, having narrowly escaped her own death and then witnessed the deaths of numerous strangers topped off by the mutilation of her own close friends, all in the span of a single night, might consider this foreplay and be in the mood for some afternoon delight. Got a problem with that?
Freda has a fine cult movie reputation for having helped give birth to modern Italo-horror. Back in 1956, he was at the helm of I, Vampiri, an atmospheric thriller widely cited as the launchpoint of Italian horror movies. He doesn't always get the credit for that, since Mario Bava took over the troubled production and won most of the acclaim, but come 1962 Freda staked his claim to a place in the history books with the deliciously loopy psychosexual drama The Horrible Dr. Hichcock, and its 1963 sequel The Ghost. Freda's work covers the gamut of Italian genre pictures, but it is his horror output that gets most contemporary attention. Although never as elegant a stylist as Bava, Freda has his charms--and with films like this one manages to make the brutal dismembering of human beings actually seem quaint.
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by David Kalat
