Home Video Review: Lamberto Bava’s ‘The Mask Of Satan’ Finally Makes Its North American Blu-ray Debut
by David Lewis
Lamberto Bava‘s 1989 Italian horror curio The Mask of Satan is making its long-awaited North American debut on Blu-ray from the twisted folks as Severin Films.
Bava had some big shoes to fill at the time. His father, Mario Bava, was a legend in horror filmmaking, and his own 1985 film Demons won over an international audience of horror fans. Originally planned as part of an international TV anthology, Mask of Satan is Lamberto’s modern update on his own father’s spooky 1960 classic Black Sunday, which was loosely inspired by a Nikolai Gogol novella. After the projected anthology series was cancelled, Mask of Satan was only shown sporadically in theaters, followed by a long out-of-print Italian VHS. It was never officially released in North America in any format.
Whereas Black Sunday was a gothic black-and-white shocker in a more classical mode, Mask of Satan is decidedly of its time, with very ’80s attire and aesthetics. The film kicks offs with what looks like an 1989 commercial for a ski resort, with a group of attractive teen skiers carving up some fresh powder on a mountainside. Things go awry when they fall into an inescapable crevasse that leads them to a spooky underground village with a cavernous church. They uncover the frozen corpse of a woman named Anibas (Eva Grimaldi), who — in a flashback to the iconic opening scene of Black Sunday — was sacrificed as a witch in the 17th Century. Anibas quickly takes possession of several of the skiers as they hole up in the isolated church, where a priest (Stanko Molnar) attempts an exorcism. Things get increasingly confusing and repetitive from there. Davide (Giovanni Guidelli) is the only one who is able to resist the witch’s seductions (at least for a while), as he tries to protect his girlfriend, Sabina (Debora Caprioglio, billed here as Debora Kinski, after her famous boyfriend at the time, Klaus Kinski). Sabina has a special connection to the witch, which is spelled out through the most hilariously obvious wordplay this side of Nilbog.
While not as compulsively watchable as Demons, the eye-catching camerawork and impressive sets keep things interesting even when the actions get repetitive, and there’s plenty of humor — not all of it intentional — but surprisingly little gore. With its endlessly moving camera, bug-eyed reaction shots, decrepit witches, and even Guidelli’s resemblance to a young Bruce Campbell, Mask of Satan seems as equally influenced by Sam Raimi‘s contemporaneous Evil Dead films as it is the senior Bava.
As is often the case with Severin releases, the extra features are more about quality than quantity. There are three well-shot and informative solo interviews with Bava, Caprioglio, and co-star Mary Sellers. Bava is a true raconteur, and he spends over half an hour discussing the film’s time in limbo and resurrection, even noting that his father didn’t like it. Caprioglio recounts her time on the film and her work with Euro film icons Kinski, Tinto Brass, and others. Sellers is quite candid, saying she’s never been interested in horror films and that a film festival audience laughed at Mask of Satan, which she deems “not scary.”
The Mask of Satan is now available on Blu-ray.
