Challenge the Devil (1963)

Original title: Katarsis

Shot by gangster types of his acquaintance, a man of dubious morals escapes into the monastery of Padre Peo (Pier Vido), in wilder times a friend of his. Apparently, it’s all about a set of documents the gangster types believe their victim is holding out on them. He, on the other hand, believes these documents were stolen from him by his friend Alma (Alma De Río).

Padre Peo decides to visit Alma at the club where she’s doing “erotic” dancing and ask her for the documents, so that everybody can go home alive and well. When she’s reticent, Peo tells her the story of his religious/moral awakening, which takes up most of the film’s running time.

Once, Peo was part of a gang of bohemian thugs led by a poet who never seems to do any poeting. Instead, the gang roams the Italian countryside in their cars and beats up strangers, as bohemian types are apparently wont to do in Italy. Eventually, they end up in a seemingly deserted castle where they start on what the film decides to call an orgy, until they are interrupted by an old man (Christopher Lee in age make-up), who does a highly dramatic declamation about the hair of his lover, his pact with the devil to keep her forever young, and the devil’s usual betrayal. He asks the bohemian thugs to search the castle for the lover’s body to give her a proper burial; in return, he’ll give them all the riches of his castle.

Thus ensues many a scene of random wanderings through castle sets of varying quality full of shadows, mirrors and weird traps that never really hurt anyone. Apparently, wandering long enough through cobwebby corridors full of dubious metaphorical nonsense makes you want to become a monk. Who knew?

Challenge the Devil as directed by one-time filmmaker Giuseppe Veggezzi is a strange, awkward but also rather interesting little movie. It really doesn’t make much sense as the exploitation plus religious messaging movie this at least purports to be, but that really only strengthens the pleasantly weird impression the whole affair made on me.

The curious genre hopping helps there, as well, of course, seeing as how the film starts as a spy/gangster film, switches over to ten minutes of (bad) singing and dancing, and then shifts towards the metaphorically gothic, never connecting the different moods that come with these shifts in any sensible manner. It’s very Italian in that, expecting its audience to go with the flow of shifting atmospheres and genre rules.

The film’s moral ideas – perhaps coming from a position of honest Catholicism, perhaps from the more amusing one of exploitational hypocrisy – are vague at best, and its attempt at selling a bit of symbolic rambling through a castle as a big spiritual event that burns the evil out of one’s soul is as unconvincing as it is bizarre. Challenge is a bit too quaint for its own good – especially in an Italian movie from 1963 – and has rather adorable ideas about what an orgy is supposed to look like. Apparently, really awkward “wild” dancing and bongo drumming are as animalistic as orgies get. The Man Who Couldn’t Afford to Orgy clearly didn’t miss out on much.

What’s pretty great about Challenge is the aesthetic presentation of its very weak case against Satan. The black and white cinematography by Angelo Baistrocchi and Mario Parapetti is very beautiful indeed, and Veggezzi uses this beauty, the artificial yet also starkly impressive sets full of black backgrounds and curious shadows, to create an at times very evocative mood of the dreamlike, suggesting the emotional and subconscious impact of these surroundings and slightly weird experiences on the characters much more convincing and effectively than anything in the actual script does. This isn’t quite enough to turn this into a lost classic, but does certainly make it more than just worth the while for anybody who does love the shadowy black and white of the Italian gothic like I do.