It took an age for us to finally be able to catch up with this Italian Exorcist cash-in (rip-off) job that was unleashed in 1974 as The Antichrist for UK audiences and The Tempter in the US. There is a feint recollection of the film being savaged by critics in the UK upon release, but then those nasty critics are always up in arms against this sort of “horror trash”.

El Anticristo was not the first of the Exorcist clones to emerge as the fantastically dreadful Devil Within Her (AKA Beyond the Door AKA Chi Sei) had already been released in Europe in “Vibrasound” to boot! The Blaxploitation version Abby was snuffed out by a miffed Warner Bros and around the same time Anticristo arrived promising more shocking demonic mayhem. The film begins with a bizarre catholic ritual where an idol of the Mother Mary is seen to be imparting incredible healing powers to a variety of losers. Our frail young heroine Ippolita (Carla Gravina) is there in her crippled condition hoping that she too can seek salvation. However things don’t work out as hoped and instead she witnesses the ghastly suicide of a heretic who plunges to his death denouncing Christ.

Later Ippolita arrives at her palatial home, deeply depressed at not having found a cure and consumed more and more by her simmering sexual frustration, but at least she is promised help in the form of a "modern" psychiatrist. She undergoes hypnosis therapy which seems to work with miraculous ease once you decorate the room with some art deco lighting! We learn from her session how she was mysteriously crippled in a car accident in which her mother died. Mysteriously because her legs appear to emerge from the wreckage without a scratch on them. However, when she is further hypnotized to a period in her “previous” life we learn that she was seemingly an incarnation of a witch who had been burned at the stake for her evil ways. Slowly these visions of her previous life begin to possess Ippolita and she relives the entire orgiastic initiation scene when "she" was formally made a slave to the devil himself by performing various disgusting acts such as swallowing the head of a freshly killed toad and then licking the pulpy blood that remains. Ippolita burns with sexual frustration as she relives the ecstacy of her rape by the demonic goat figure. But then she discovers ecstacy and finds the strength in her legs slowly re-emerging. Fuelled by her insatiable lust, she now takes to stalking young tourists whom she seduces and disposes of in the most hideous manner, but then we know by now that she in Satan’s vice like grip.

Her condition deteriorates alarmingly and her hairstyle goes from bad to terrible in no time at all as does her make up. She starts producing all sorts of fairly disgusting (if staple for the genre) pea soup like vomit, which is liberally sprayed over various hapless victims during proceedings. Ippolita starts using the most shocking language and speaks in a booming masculine voice – the typical, utterly stereotyped “devil’s voice” (note that the devil always speaks in a clipped British accent rather than an American one). There are numerous lamentable levitation scenes and the usual moving furniture and flying objects hurtling through the air whenever Ippolita turns nasty. Then, finally, a gnarled, sage is sent in the guise of an Exorcist to do his thing and save the day.

Everything about this movie is stale and contrived; the story is beyond plain silly and the acting and dubbing even worse. The possession sequences and the special effects are ludicrous at best and the levitation sequences are so awful that they could well have been created here in Lollywood. The climactic scene when Ippolita's arm goes for an excursion is so cheaply and amateurishly staged that it’s worth seeing the movie for that scene alone. The film is a long yawn from beginning to end with little to grab one’s interest – I found myself nodding off to sleep more than a couple of times then having to back up just to keep abreast of events – what a crashing bore, not even funny! The film is an exercise in tedium from the very outset and doesn’t improve at any moment during the way. The acting, dubbing, special effects, script, direction…it’s difficult deciding which is worse than the other. The only aspect of the film that isn’t an outright embarrassment is the background score of Ennio Morricone and to be fair poor Carla Gravina strives valiantly looking very much like Glenn Close as she got more and more insane in Fatal Attraction. This film is truly the dregs even if its director has a lot to say about it, yet one still has to thank Anchor Bay for digging it up and allowing demented hardcore horror buffs to finally get to see it in all its “uncut” glory…goatesque (geddit?) orgy scene and all!