The Devil's Wedding Night 4K 1973

How pleasant it is to watch trash like Il plenilunio delle vergini, unclouded by even a shred of common sense. Of course, tons of similar “films” are still being made today, but they lack the chic and aristocratic carelessness of the 1970s. There is plenty of crude force and peasant simplicity. But the ability to bow and scrape while producing one piece of nonsense after another, so that even the most sophisticated viewer cannot help but smile and feel no negative emotions, is a thing of the past.

Luigi Batzella's The Devil's Wedding Night is one of the most striking examples of this ability. The story of the misadventures of two brothers in Dracula's castle is a veritable panopticon of cinematic nonsense, but it is presented with such skill, mastery, and tact that simply turning around and walking away would be the height of rudeness and bad taste. Well, you wouldn't say something like “Get out, you fool!” to a decrepit and senile English lady who is offering you tea and biscuits. You would finish your drink, say goodbye politely, and smile as you recall the absurd and empty conversation.

The story of the twin brothers Karl and Friedrich Schiller, who, in search of the mysterious Ring of the Nibelungs, travel to Count Dracula's castle in Transylvania, is just like such a conversation: worthless, but quite pleasant, allowing you not to think about pressing matters and even laugh here and there (to yourself, of course, surreptitiously, but still...). No, just think about it — the Ring of the Nibelungs in Dracula's castle! It's ridiculous... And even though the count himself could not be found in the castle, there lives a countess who is very well preserved for her several hundred years. And all because on full moons she takes baths of the blood of young virgins... Her name is not Báthory, but Dracula — but what difference does it make? And does it really matter that in Transylvania, the door of a local drinking establishment is marked with the Cyrillic word “KRŌCHMA,” that the evil countess's castle has samovars on the shelves, and that a burly bald man in an embroidered kosovorotka and sharovary climbs out of a stone tomb (who said “Kotovsky”?)... But in the right places, there will always be a timely “Boo!”, beautiful virgins will be sacrificed on the altar during a black mass to the gloomy incantation “Om mane padme hum” (don't laugh, just don't laugh!), and the ring itself will be the size of your native LLC's seal and burn with a bright (unfortunately not blue) flame.

And with all this nonsense, the film leaves a light and very pleasant impression. Well, what do you want—you don't expect a fairy tale to have even the slightest semblance of plausibility. And Luigi Batzella didn't even shoot a comic book—he shot a fairy tale. A scary fairy tale in the spirit of the Brothers Grimm. Twenty years later, Terry Gilliam would shoot something similar, but despite all the merits of his film, it lacked the immediacy and naive naturalness of Batzella's picture, which were the only things that could make The Devil's Wedding Night not a preserved specimen of a cabinet of curiosities, where various freaks are collected, but a completely lively and pleasing to the eye cinematic spectacle. People knew how to do it!