Jack Nelson (Mickey Hargitay) arrives a gloomy looking castle with his fiancé Laureen (Rita Calderoni) and strange things start to happen immediately. Why? The hell if I know but it is somehow related to Laureen being the reincarnation of Isabella, a witch who was staked and burned alive 500 years ago. Oh, and there are some vampires wandering around too. This is my second Renato Polselli flick (after the previous year's DELIRIUM, also with Hargitay) and I'm not quite sure what to make of it. It is great in spots (moody lighting and an interesting editing technique) and completely lousy in others (totally fake rubber bats and easily exposed black backdrops outside of set windows). The biggest problem is it runs way too long (1 hour and 49 minutes) and doesn't make a lick of sense. Worth seeing once just for the 70s feel and the abundance of nudity.

Well you sure can't fault director Renato Polselli for not trying to entertain us that's for sure. The Reincarnation of Isabel like his deranged giallo Delirium before it is a non-stop barrage of sleazy thrills and gore. Polselli was certainly not a director who could be accused of being understated. His films are deranged and borderline incomprehensible, and full to the brim with naked women. He was clearly an unashamed exploitation film-maker who just got down to it and served up the goods with no consideration whatsoever to good taste and decency. But you know what? His movies do have a definite style – albeit a pretty haphazard one. The Reincarnation of Isabel is a perfect example. It's about a group of vampires who keep the body of a witch in the basement of a castle, awaiting a chance to resurrect her with the blood of several virgins. Cue the arrival of a party of knuckle-heads with the requisite gaggle of – deeply unconvincing – virgins.I suppose it's a rip off of Mario Bava's Black Sunday in a way. Not that you'll probably notice as other than the witch idea it's a pure sleaze-fest with some gory violence chucked in for good measure. Every woman who appears in it gets naked and is terrorised at some point. Its sexist stuff of the first order naturally, although not quite as misogynistic as Delirium. The story sort of makes sense some of the time but you'll be forgiven for wondering what's going on a lot of the rest of the time. Polselli's haphazard style is the reason for this, as scenes are edited together bizarrely and characters act in ways that can only be described as insane. The film stars the always entertaining Mickey Hargitay and Rita Calderoni, both of who appear in Delirium along with most of the other cast members from that film. I was also astonished at the appalling haircuts sported by most of the girls – in virtually every other Italian production from the time the women all look like they have been groomed by super-chic stylists; the chicks here look more like they have been dragged through a hedge. But what the hell, they all get naked right? Anyway, the soundtrack is pretty good - quite moody and at times psychedelic, while the camera work is sometimes inventive and the dungeon set is admittedly pretty funky.Overall, it's a very commendable example of Euro-Trash. Senseless? Yes. Gratuitous? Of course. Laughable? At times. Entertaining? Oh yeah.

Riti, Magie Nere e Segrete Orge nel Trecento (which translates into English as Rites, Black Magic and Secret Orgies in the Fourteenth Century apparently), or Black Magic Rites as it's more commonly known as along with other suggestive titles such as The Horrible Orgies of Count Dracula & The Reincarnation of Isabel, starts in the crypt of a large castle with a sacrificial offering to a Vampire/witch named Isabella (Rita Calderoni) 'the great mistress' who was burned alive in the fourteenth century. An unfortunate woman is tied to a stone slab & her heart is cut out by Isabella's husband who happens to be Count Dracula (Raoul Rossi) himself! But without any fangs. In a ritual of the twenty-fifth moon Isabella will be reincarnated, anyway another woman named Raquel is killed & her heart removed. Laureen (Rita Calderoni again) & Richard are engaged to be married & Laureens uncle Jack (Mickey Hargitay) has brought the castle for her, they are holding a big party & various guests fall victim to Isabella's reincarnation rites as she needs the heart & eyes of a virgin or something like that & that's as well as I can explain the 'story', if I've got something wrong don't bother letting me know as I don't care.This Italian production was written & directed by Renato Polselli (he directed under the pseudonym Ralph Brown) & quite frankly is one of the most incoherent, bizarre, strange, baffling & worthless films I've seen in a long time. The script probably made some sort of sense as the written word on a piece of paper but in the hands of Polselli, sorry Brown it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. I'm not exaggerating when I say I seriously doubt anyone will be able to follow this thing & make any sort of sense out of it. People do things for no apparent reason, their motivations are baffling, the story is an absolute mess that's all over the place, the character's are virtually indefinable & it's hard to keep track of who's who, the dialogue is minimal & the subtitles lead me to believe it's very basic & Polselli tries his hand at a bit of comedy with a idiot bloke who has a threesome with two women complete with comedy soundtrack & a bit where he tries to remove a hair from his mouth, I'm not sure if the hair came form the women or his terrible moustache! There is also some weirdo hunchback guy named Greg(!) (Marcello Bonini Olas) & references to Count Dracula & Vampires as if things weren't strange enough already. I don't even think Riti, Magie Nere e Sergrete Orge nel Trecento should be called a 'film' & I'm sure most would agree that you need to be taking something to enjoy this, the filmmakers obviously did!Director Polselli certainly gives the film a unique look, it has very rich colours & a cool visual style throughout but bathing people & things in bright neon lights for no reason whatsoever just adds another layer of bizarreness to the proceedings. Anyway it's pretty nice to look at. The editing is atrocious as it cuts to random scenes, things & people that seem to have nothing to do with the current situation. Even simple scenes of two people talking become highly irritating as Polselli cuts, zooms & pans all over the place. The continuity is unbelievably bad, just check the scene out when the two women are chased through the village it switches between bright daytime & the dead of night seemingly at random! There's a bit when someone is buried & from the outside the coffin is a normal size but when the film cuts inside it's massive! There is plenty of naked flesh on show & a couple of ripped out hearts but nothing too explicit.Technically the film alternates between very good & extremely stylish to the most poorly made atrocity I've seen, there's a bit at the end with a 'snake pit' which has all of two rubber snakes in it! You can see the wire/string pulling them along! The awful rubber bats aren't any better either. The acting is, well not great but then look at what they had to work with. Basically nothing.Riti, Magie Nere e Segrete Orge nel Trecento is an absolute mess of a film, it's confusing, muddled, incoherent & worst of all it provides virtually zero entertainment value. It's certainly unique & I doubt there are too many film out there like this but that in itself is not recommendation. It has a few nice visually stylistic moments in it, a few babes & a couple of ripped out hearts, apart from that it's worthless.

This movie is best known as 'The Reincarnation Of Isabel', though I watched it as 'Black Magic Rites'. It's also sometimes titled 'The Ghastly Orgies Of Count Dracula'. Anyway, whatever you call it this is one freaky movie! This kind of quasi-psychedelic Eurohorror is I admit an acquired taste, but as I'm already a big fan of this kind of thing I find it hard to be objective about it. Despite (or maybe because of!) an impossible to follow plot, plenty of lousy acting and any excuse whatsoever to get the babes topless this is one of the weirdest and most entertaining movies of this type I've ever seen! Rita Calderoni from 'Nude For Satan' co-stars with Mickey Hargitay, the former bodybuilder and husband of Jayne Mansfield, who appeared in 'The Bloody Pit Of Horror' (by the way, if you're curious you can see Arnie play Hargitay in 'The Jayne Mansfield Story'). If you've seen 'Nude For Satan', imagine it was re-edited by someone tripping on acid and you'll have some idea of what '...Isabel' is like! If I resort to cliches and say you have to see it to believe it, it's because it's true... The plot... well, who knows what the plot is about! Some guys dressed up like Satanic superheros are sacrificing virgins in an attempt to resurrect their long dead leader, the witch (or was that vampire?) Isabella, who was burned at the stake by angry villagers hundreds of years before. I think. Oh, and Dracula's in there somewhere but I can't quite recall why. There are lots of flash backs and just about everybody plays two roles, so it's quite difficult to work out what the hell is going on most of the time! But you know what? It doesn't matter. I loved every minute of it.