Review: Katarsis

A monk (Ulderico Sciaretta) goes to a nightclub to see an acquaintance who works there and proceeds to tell her a story from long ago. In his youth, the monk and his five boozy friends end up in a dingy old castle where a haunted old man (Christopher Lee) offers them treasure if only they can find his lost love.

 

One of the more obscure – and forgettable – films in the career of Christopher Lee, this 1963 film from one-and-done writer-director Giuseppe Veggezzi is for Lee completists only, like me. And frankly, even I didn’t get much out of this one. It’s been dreadfully edited – apparently the film went through more than one production company and much of the film was changed before its eventual release. The seams show. Badly. Characters are introduced early that have no bearing on anything else. The film’s opener sets up Ulderico Sciaretta’s monk character as our protagonist only for him to be a bit of an also-ran for the bulk of the film, not to mention seeming like a completely different character. To be honest, he’s boring and probably not the best character to have chosen to be telling this story. It’s his only film performance, but he was the film’s producer, so that explains a lot.

 

The plot doesn’t even kick in until after about 25 minutes, where is finally starts to perk up a bit. Sadly, Lee is really only featured strongly in one scene, and dubbed by someone else. He gives a wonderfully haunted performance, but it really is just a guest cameo role. I’m assuming by the low-budget nature of the film (and the financial issues involved) that the only thing Lee got out of the film was a nice Italian holiday. Having said that, once Lee does turn up for his one scene it turns the film into a more Bava-esque direction, which is at least a helluva lot more interesting to me than whatever gangster nonsense was going on at the beginning there. We’re still stuck with drunken bozo youngster characters for the most part, but it’s interesting enough to keep this from being among Lee’s worst films, if no more than that. It’s just that it’s very easy to see why so few people have heard of this one. It kinda deserves its obscurity due to extreme mediocrity. The best thing here is the B&W cinematography by Angelo Baistrocchi (“Erotic Games of a Respectable Family”) and Mario Parapetti (“Sinbad and the Seven Saracens”).

 

Rating: C

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