Sodoma's Ghost

I do have to say, this poster is pretty baller. They should have used this for THE KEEP.

Sodoma’s Ghost (1988)

Dir. Lucio Fulci

Written by Lucio Fulci, Carlo Alberto Alfieri

Starring Claudio Aliotti, Maria Concetta Salieri, Robert Egon, Al Cliver

Well, one minute and 30 seconds into SODOMA’s GHOST, including credits (which play over stygian blackness in total silence) we’ve got a Nazi cocaine orgy. Unfortunately it’s the same Nazi orgy I already saw in CAT IN THE BRAIN, which blunts a little bit of the shock value they were probably counting on here. And in CAT IN THE BRAIN you also had the added bonus of watching director Lucio Fulci intensely staring at everything from behind the camera, which gave it a little more pizzazz. But still, Nazi coke orgy! I guess that lets you know what kind of party it’s gonna be right off the bat, anyway. Six minutes later it’s still going. Finally, a Nazi shoots a pool ball into a reposing woman’s vagina, and there’s an explosion, and then we’re on to the actual plot. Which is not exactly as severe a pivot as you might assume, because that plot turns out to also be mostly porn, and a lot of it with Nazis, though admittedly the beginning is the only orgy. I realize that to the casual filmgoer, the idea that a movie could just unexpectedly turn out to be Nazi porn* seems even more alien than the idea that you could unintentionally stumble upon the same Nazi porn twice, but I assure you that in the particular cultural beat I report on, this is an ever-present possibility and you just have to learn to roll with it. Well, this is no time to self-reflect about the genre I’ve spent my life studying, come on guys let’s move on nothing to see here.

Once we’ve established the narratively “vital” fact that there is this Italian villa where one time there was a Nazi coke orgy, we’re introduced to the six blandest actors in Italy as they arrive at the very same Nazi villa in modern times, and find it deserted. They hang out there, and one of them has a Nazi S&M dream. Then they leave. And then they come back, and this time they find they can’t leave, the doors and windows are locked (and can’t be broken open). So they prattle obnoxiously at each other for awhile. This takes up roughly 50 minutes of an 84 minute movie. Finally, at 50 minutes, some kind of horror part starts to kick in; it seems there’s an evil, possibly Nazi, ghost and/or ghosts in the house that can tempt you by showing you things in a mirror. “Things” which, in every case, turn out to be boobs. There are endless, endless amounts of boobs in this movie (every female cast member gets topless, with no exceptions) and although this is an admittedly friendly gesture on the part of the movie, it gets old pretty fast when you’re hoping for some kind of horror. Plenty of hustling genre movies try to hedge their bets by dumping a bunch of softcore nonsense into the inevitable downtime that arises from the necessity of putting something on-screen for a minimum of 75 minutes, but this seems like a case where they started to shoot some filler nudity and then just got distracted and kept shooting more and more and then forgot to go back and add the genre stuff. I’m unclear if the Nazis are able to tempt you with other things too, and it just never occurs to them to try. But at any rate, boobs seem to consistently do the trick, so why mess with a winning strategy?

There are literally almost no screenshots from this movie that can be posted unedited on a wholesome family site like this one.

Director Lucio Fulci  (ZOMBI 2, HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY, THE BEYOND, CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD, THE NEW YORK RIPPER, CAT IN THE BRAIN, DOOR INTO SILENCE) is one of those slippery genre auteurs who is justifiably ranked with the greats, but did not exactly have an unimpeachable track record of quality. Probably his most widely recognizable auteurial trademark is that his films have boldly nonsensical, haphazard narratives redeemed by a few absolutely stellar setpieces. It’s been maybe a decade since I’ve seen it, but my recollection is that even his arguably most famous film, ZOMBI 2, is almost entirely absolutely unwatchable dreck except that it also happens to have maybe the three best zombie gore scenes ever put on celluloid. That forgives a lot -- and to be a Fulci fan is inherently to forgive a lot-- but SODOMA’S GHOST is, regrettably, almost entirely unwatchable dreck, minus any of the good parts.

But even this deep into his late-career decline, Fulci was still Fulci, and so, from about minute 50 to minute 60, suddenly Fulci the thriller director, not Fulci the softcore porn director, turns up out of the blue. For a hot moment, things get inexplicably good, with a disquieting, intense Russian Roulette sequence, a surreal walk through an impressionistically lit house with unsourced, untranslated German being shouted from somewhere, and a crazy sex nightmare which ends with the guy grabbing his paramore's boobs, only to find they're filled with decay and maggots. They follow that up by dragging the guy’s body downstairs, where it suddenly starts decaying really disgustingly while the camera digs in close to check out the gnarly detail. Granted, that may not sound like a universally appealing description of a fun night at the movies, but at least it’s making some effort. Stephen King famously said, “I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I'll go for the gross-out.” Nothing in this movie was ever going to terrify or horrify, but at least going for the gross-out means they were trying.

Anyway, starting right at minute 50 there’s a legitimately functional 10 minute stretch of a movie which otherwise barely has a worthwhile 10 seconds. It’s enough to get your hopes up that maybe the movie will manage to stick the landing and redeem itself. Alas, immediately thereafter the Fulci who cares checks out again, and things settle right back into the previously established standard routine of people taking their tops off and having sinister Germans offer them more boobs through a mirror, none of which really goes anywhere (for example, there's a long scene where a topless German woman makes a lesbian think her girlfriend is getting it on with another girl, but then she storms downstairs to catch them and they’re not, so nothing happens with that. Not sure why someone felt it was worth including in a movie).

As the MIRROR MIRROR series unequivocally demonstrated, evil mirrors are not exactly the stuff of gripping cinema. Nazis have a slightly better track record, as least as far as sleazy genre entertainment goes, so no real surprise, then, that the best part (of a movie almost entirely lacking in good parts) is Robert Egon (“Italian Street Boy” in MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO, “Perfect Young Italian” [seriously] in 1990’s CAPTAIN AMERICA) as the young Nazi who is filming the orgy (not participating) and shows up to tempt two of our “heroes” in the present. He has an arresting presence, half smug Aryan malice and half infuriatingly mild politeness. I prefer the idea that he’s not a Nazi at all, but rather some sort of ancient spirit in the house which got to the venal Nazis even more than he’s able to with the horny teens. There’s never anything specific to suggest that, but if there’s anything at all interesting about the movie, it’s the inhuman, opaque quality of the antagonists, which Egon embodies best. Most ghost stories are fundamentally built around the mystery of who the ghosts were and what they want. Here, that question is never raised, and the answer never appears. Do they want, like, revenge, or corruption of the innocent, or what? Does their being Nazis and trying to seduce the youth read like a metaphor? The movie never even seems aware that you might have these questions, which is certainly a symptom of its abject idiotic incompetence more than its narrative boldness, but at least the effect is a little exotic. Anyway, Egon’s only really in two scenes, which is a shame since the whole climax could really use him.

Speaking of which, the climax is such a wispy bit of tired nothing that it feels wrong to even describe it with that term, but I do sort of like the film’s final, insipid twist of a coda. (SPOILERS) See, it turns out that after a long night of obnoxious arguing and death and boobs and Nazis, everyone just… wakes up on the lawn, apparently having dreamed the whole thing! They just laugh it off and drive away, and that’s the end of the movie! Obviously, an ending so amazingly corny and insulting has drawn quite a bit of ire over the years. And it’s not hard to see why; if you somehow managed the seemingly impossible feat of taking the movie seriously up to that point (and there’s certainly nothing in the movie itself which would suggest you aren’t meant to) one can well imagine how an ending this flagrantly dismissive would be an absolutely mortifying affront (see [SPOILERS for THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW]: THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW). But I actually sort of enjoy the dorky, sincere niceness of it; you get the feeling Fulci ended up kinda liking these dumbass kids and wanting to give them a happy ending, especially after so many of them were nice enough to show him their tits. It’s sort of sweet, really, which is a weird and possibly psychotic thing to have to say about a movie which opens with a full five minutes of Nazi orgy, but here we are. And here we will leave it.

PS: I have no idea who Sodoma is.

Alternate take: “The problem with this movie is it’s just not sleazy enough. So, a sleazy Nazi film without sleaze? Yep, that’s all we have here. While it’s not entirely true that there’s no sleaze as actresses like to shuck their clothes to show us their very modest endowments – though most are small enough that it seems like Fulci did his casting calls at junior high schools – there’s no eroticism or sizzle with the sleaze. It just plain doesn’t feel sexy or even dirty.” --Cult Review’s “Perfesser Deviant” who probably needs to take a break from Italian movies for awhile.

* Hello there, Academy-Award-For-Best-Picture-Nominee THE READER.

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TAGLINE	None, but with a title that lurid, what else do you need to say?
TITLE ACCURACY	Since I have no idea what it means, I can’t begin to tell you. There does seem to be one or more ghost, anyway.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No
SEQUEL?	None
REMAKE?	No
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	Italy
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Haunted Houses, Nazis
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	None, but I do want to point out that Art Director Franco Vanorio performed the same duties on PIRANHA 2: THE SPAWNING, which means he worked with James Cameron.
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	Lucio Fulci behind the camera.
NUDITY?	Almost non-stop
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	Probably, but if you didn’t stop reading at “Nazi coke orgy” I doubt anything else the movie can throw at you is going to upset you.
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	No
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	Yes
POSSESSION?	Not really
CREEPY DOLLS?	None
EVIL CULT?	None
MADNESS?	Nah
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	None
VOYEURISM?	Yes
MORAL OF THE STORY	Whatever moral this movie is trying to get you to learn, I would resist it.