I wanted to do something special for the werewolf entry of this year’s Spooktacular Eight… and then realized i had the perfect movie hidden under my nose, in a way, because in anno domini 1987, in Italy released La Croce Dalle Sette Pietre (lit “The Cross Of The Seven Jewels/Stones”)….. and by that i do mean it got a theatrical release.
In just 2 theathers in the entire frigging country, but if you were lucky/unlucky enough and you lived in Sicily back in 1987 you could actually go to the cinemas and witness what would become hailed as one of the worst Italian movie ever made, ever.
Then again, an Italian horror movie with werewolves, satanic orgies, and the camorra (a Southern Italian specific mafia-style criminal group originating from Neaples) was always gonna be a cult trash film, especially if made on the cheap and treated as an embarassing relic to disregard.
And with good reason, this is some primo trash that feels made for retrospective reviewers to unearth and poke fun at…. which the movie does deserve, because it’s so unbelievably bad it’s downright magical, it’s that kind of “so bad it’s good” you can never forget.
The plot is already utterly delirious even at a glance, as it starts off with a maso-satanistic orgy ritual to the demon Aborym, then cuts to years later, following Marco Sartieri, a bank teller from Rome, who goes down to Neaples in order to meet with his cousin, Carmela, as they haven’t seen each other in years.
They meet up at the station, have a coffee, then take a walk and Marco gets robbed of the jewel-studded cross he wears on his neck, follows the robbers, and with the help of the police tries to retrieve it, but to no avail, as they sold the cross already, but that doesn’t stop Marco, whom tries to search for info on his stolen jewelled religious necklace, in the process having to butt heads with Camorra dons and their mafia affairs.
What the Camorra didn’t expect (and couldn’t possibly know), is that Marco isn’t randomly trying to get killed by the mob just over a valuable family heirloom, but the jeweled cross is actually an amulet that stops Marco from turning into a werewolf every night, and that he’s actually a sort of Tefling, as in, he was conceived during the opening orgy by a human woman laying with the demon Aborym, and his mother gave him the cross to stop that… because she somehow knew?
Actually, yes. Kinda. Kinda not.
Yeah, even by trying to explain that you can already see there’s more holes in the script than in a ocarina pegging session, so it’s no wonder the finale sees Marco retrieve the cross, turn back into human, and immediatly as he does, the demonic priest that summoned Aborym dies in a car accident, immediatly, as Marco and Carmela walk into Rome’s famous Piazza San Pietro and an image of – i’m not fucking with you – Jesus Christ himself appears smiling in semi-transparency, simbolizing the victory of good (and love) over the forces of evil.
Mostly because we’re almost at the 80 minutes mark, so we need to close those subplots down fast and hard, even if it makes no sense… like this even mattered for the rest of the movie, but it did open on a satanic orgy with people whipping women, moaning and groping, so it “fits”.
If you didn’t have an aneurysm trying to read that, congratulations, but we’re not done discussing how much of this film it literally stuff happening, regardless if it makes any sense or not.
For example, i didn’t tell you that Marco’s cousin, Carmela, isn’t actually the one that Marco met at the train station, she was a friend of Carmela’s, which just decided to impersonate her because..?
Strap in because that aneurysm is only gonna get bigger and bigger.
Then again, we’re not really introduced to Marco’s cousin,, we just cut from him manhandling one of the robbers to him drinking coffee in a house with a woman… which also isn’t Carmela, then he fucks off to meet what he believes to be Carmela’s friend, but is actually Carmela.
And yes, the explanation of why she thinks her friend, Elena, passed herself off as Carmela, also doesn’t make any sense, because Elena somehow heard so much about Marco from her… and yet when Carmela meets him not only she doesn’t recognize him, but also says immediatly they haven’t talked with each other in years, so what are we even talking about?
This all just to have Marco get robbed of the jewel, but of course it would be too much to expect it actually being a ploy and Elena having been in cohoots with the robbers or some cultists, no, obviously she never shows up again.
When it isn’t insanely stupid… it is, but it’s also super goofy, like the awful acting of the priest that calls upon Aborym like he’s calling upon a stubborn dog and not a demon…. which eventually appears and of course he looks like a partially shaved Wookie.
A Wookie-wolf, if you will.
Also, as a “bonus”, it’s also incredibly full of Neopolitan stereotypes of the lowest kind, the more obvious and tired ones, like immediatly getting robbed by guys on a vespa when in town, the first scene without the protagonist being of people dealing and doing drugs to each other, people selling bread on the streets, having Camorra dons being pretty much cartoon stereotypes of italian mob bosses seen in American films… and yet the director was Neapolitan and did bases the film on some of his real life encounters with the Camorra, or so he says the Wikipedia page, but then again there’s a long time tradition of charlatans & entertaiment peddling piffle, so yeah, whatever.
This all topped off with some weird camera angles that fuck up prospective, weird color filters over acid trip nightmare scenes to make it go full psychotronic, ludicrous music, choppy editing,m a plethora of hilarious terrible dialogues, a lot of laughable acting all around, by both the italian and the few American actors roped into this crapftest, with some that also repeat the same line with the same cadence in a matter of seconds, like a toy with a voice chip, and frankly Andolfi himself isn’t really much better, despite him clearly trying as Marco.
and of course, the main course of hilarity being the werewolf transformation…. which again, makes some kind of sense only if we assume Aborym was also supposed to a werewolf demon.
But we don’t even get Grandpa Wookie from the Star Wars Christmas Special, no, what we get is a naked man with pubic wolf fur (that or a bat died upon contact with his pubical region) on his crotch and a half-ish Wookie head mask on, like if the Altered Beast werewolf transformation went awry and ironically made him less hairy, as he goes around with his bare butt out.
Words just don’t make the costume any “justice”, let’s just say not even Hentai Kamen would be caught wearing that, and even more incredible, we also later get a classic cross-fade & dissolves slow werewolf transformation starting from the face… even though its super slow and the howls sound more like they come from a pack of werecows more than anything, so inept is this film.
The movie was directed, written and starred Marco Antonio Andolfi, which here credits himself as Enny Endolf, which is pretty typical stuff for the era and genre, but in spite of everything, i can’t hate Andinolfi for basically doing almost everything, he also cured the editing, undeniably this is HIS baby, his only child, as this was his directorial debut (and boy can you tell), and unsurprisingly was his only directed theathrical release, he did act in other films and shorts.
Also, in 1995 he did repackage the film under the title Talisman, by cutting off scenes and stuffing the thing not only with newsreel and documentary footage, but also scenes from Wes Craven’s The Serpent And The Rainbow.
I didn’t see that version, i might check it out later as an addendum of sorts, but in 2007 he did come back with Riecco Aborym (“Aborym is back at it again”), a 30 minutes short that’s actually a sequel… and which i would like to say i’m reviewing it right here right now, but i can’t, because it was shown just in some horror festivals and other small screenings for local horror events, and while apparently it was included in the 2022 Blu Ray rerelease of Cross Of The Seven Jewels as an extra… i missed out on that, and at the moment of writing i simply cannot find it.
When i can i will review that because i feel we’re all responsible for that happening, and i will pay my due when circumstance and fate will enable me.
As for Mario Antonio Andolfi, he passed away in 2018, so i can only say thank you Mr. Andolfi for being basically a one movie italian Ed Wood., because while it’s embarassingly bad, some Z-grade trash indeed, it’s also undeniably confident in itself and committed to its vision and making it happen, with a sincerity that now is basically extinct in the trash low budget horror market.
It’s something to see to be believed it actually exists, it’s squallid cosmic trash that edges on the very bottom of the bin, and i won’t have it any other way.
Almost forgot: while i already confessed to miss out on the 2022 Blu-Ray restoration by Tetra Video, today the movie can be found fairly easily and actually can even rented on streaming here in Italy, legally, which in itself it’s unbelievable as the film itself.
