Malabimba (1979)
Dir. Andrea Bianchi
Bimba’s in trouble. In a gothic castle, her family has conducted a seance to try to contact her dead mother, accidentally releasing the spirit of a dead relative that finds its way into Bimba’s body. As Bimba begins to act out in a series of escalating naughty behaviors, it’s up to Sister Sofia, the family’s resident nun-in-training to free Bimba from the curse and save her soul from eternal damnation. Maybe.
You’d be forgiven for concluding that Malabimba is a horror film based on the above description. Centered around a young girl being possessed by a spirit in an old gothic castle, the premise is ripe for all the sorts of Exorcist style shenanigans that only Italian rip-off artists can deliver. But director Andrea Bianchi and writer Piero Regnoli have something more important on the mind; lots of sleazy sex. This is much more a psychosexual soap opera than it is a horror film. If you’re looking for blood and gore, or ghosts and ghouls and goblins, you’ll be disappointed in this endeavor. But if you’re into weirdness and batshit sex games, Malabimba will be a revelation.
The only real horror sequences are at the beginning and end of the film, and even those scenes are pretty lite on it. In the place of heads spinning and pea soup spitting, we’re treated to spectral molestation by way of seance, scene after scene of Bimba’s aunt Nais seducing Bimba’s father and screwing the family lawyer, complete with some of the ugliest spliced in producer mandated hardcore close ups, and in an utterly inspired twist on The Exorcist’s crucifix masturbation, Bimba sexualizes a teddy bear and a stuffed Santa doll.
It all sounds quite silly, and it is. But somehow, in spite of itself, Malabimba surprisingly kind of works as a treatise on bourgeois hypocrisy, familial neglect, and sexual repression. Bimba is a girl in the midst of sexual awakening, having to discover herself while locked up in a castle, away from the rest of the world and anyone her own age. Her only models for sexual conduct are a nurturing but celibate nun, her uptight and self-repressed father, and her proudly liberated, slutty, adulterous aunt. It’s almost tragic to watch the self perpetuating cycles of pleasure and shame she goes through as she tries to make sense of her burgeoning womanhood.
The Exorcist connections resurface in the film’s final scenes, with Sister Sofia making a final play for Bimba’s soul. It doesn’t really make sense. And it doesn’t really have to; it is European after all. And by this point Bianchi has assured us that this isn’t just your dime-a-dozen satanic possession riff. It’s both more and less, an idiosyncratic hypersexual melodrama with its heart somehow in the right place, and its brain in the gutter.
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