Le Regine AKA Queens of Evil (Tonino Cervi, 1970)

Strange movie, not at all an Eurotrash I was expecting to see. It does have few beautiful chicks (my beloved Haydée Politoff among them), some nudity and a couple of fuck scenes but these are all just tools used for driving good and pretty coherent story.

We start with this free-spirited hippie wondering into the woods on his Suzuki where he ends up staying with three sisters living close to some mysterious castle. We suspect of course that they are not real siblings (if nothing else, see title) and also in a prior sub-plot it was hinted that the owner of a castle is a prince of, oh well - you know, the darkness. So our poor hippie falls for these witches and eventually sells them his free spirit (soul?) and even worse - he declares to them that he's "so happy he could die right away". Big fucking mistake of course, you don't need to second guess how they react to this statement, do you?

So, it's pretty fairytale-ish and cool thing about it is that overall atmosphere is totally in sync with this. Lots of shadows, weird shooting angles, night shots and some great background music (liked that church choir singing). Really creepy and sinister at times.

Needs to be said though that not much really happens in the first hour but it doesn't get boring. At that point I was afraid that movie will fall apart as things will start to unravel. So many of these bizarre European low budget horror movies follow this pattern and they just go crazy. Not this one, it's carefully and even elegantly conducted to its conclusion. Director seems to knew what he was doing and what he was trying to achieve. Hell, we even get some sort of moral preaching from the prince of darkness himself!

7/10