The Mask of Satan (1990)

aka Demons 5: The Devil’s Veil

Original title: La maschera del demonio

Virginal (that’s going to be important later on) Davide (Giovanni Guidelli) and Sabina (Debora Caprioglio aka Debora Kinski) are on a ski vacation with a group of their decidedly non-virginal and deeply assholish friends. How assholish? These people don’t even stop clowning around like damn fools when the whole group falls into a crevasse in the mountains, leaving Sabina with a broken leg.

Down in their new hole, they also stumble upon the dead body of the witch Anibas (Eva Grimaldi), wearing the titular mask until one of the idiots removes it. Just after that things become really unstable and one of their own is stabbed by a piece of ice. On the plus side, Sabina is suddenly healed of her injury and the movements of the ice open up the way into a half-buried monastery, that is, curiously enough, still inhabited by a – rather creepy – priest and his dog.

Having no way out (and, being Italian horror movie characters, never asking themselves how the priest gets his food), the group moves into the monastery for now. Soon, everyone but the two virgins is starting to act even worse than before, falling into increasing amounts of creepy laughter, violence, as well as a bit of orgying and witchy dancing. This is just he beginning of a very bad time for our two virgins, though.

In 1990, when Lamberto Bava made this movie kinda-sorta based on Gogol’s “Viy” (at least if you squint a little and only watch its climax), and supposedly also loosely based on Bava senior’s Black Sunday, Italian horror as we loved it was pretty much over. Only a few stalwarts like the younger Bava managed to get tiny budgets together to still make films like it. And really, given what Bava had to work with, this is a surprisingly great late example of the genre as it was practiced in Italy, plotted loosely as is tradition, with quite a few scenes of a wonderfully macabre and dreamlike mood and a lot of wild and woolly ideas.

When it comes to the film’s crazier side, my personal favourite is actually the implied death of the priest’s dog, who, having survived quite some crap already at that point in the movie, wanders into a room full of probably demonic cats, who are clearly licking their chops hungrily. Cats, we have never seen before and never will again, obviously. On the less silly-crazy side is a rather wonderful scene that finds the priest holed up in a free standing confessional, that becomes surrounded by the possessed who dance, howl and crash against the thing, until the good old invisible force of evil appears via steadicam and slowly crushes the thing. On a logical level, this sort of thing does of course make little sense, but Bava’s not out for logic here; and on the level of mood and style, scenes like it are pretty brilliant.

Thematically, the film is clearly out to do something with ideas about the problem with male sexual desire or the fear of commitment, as seen in the pretty incredibly made scene in which an attempt at a first sexual encounter with the increasingly deranged Sabina finds her turn into the most frightful looking rubbery witch (with chicken feet), the special effects team could come up with while she’s lying on top of Davide. It’s not clear what the film actually wants to say about male sexuality, mind you, for this more intellectually modern business comes up hard against the parts of the film that are about demonically possessed trying to press a virginal guy into a sexual encounter that may or may not be a way to free their demon witch boss. Which may be thematically related but is not really the same.

However, given how enthusiastically the film mixes the freakish side of Italian horror with the younger Bava’s effective sense for lighting and mood (the monastery makes no sense as a real place but quite a bit of it as a visual representation of a feeling of things buried, for example), and quite a bit of genuine weirdness, I’m not too bothered that The Mask of Satan makes more sense as a mood put into moving pictures than anything else.