The director of BURIAL GROUND takes on demonic possession with a sexy twist in MALABIMBA, on Blu-ray/DVD combo from Vinegar Syndrome.

Concerned about the awkward stage his teenage daughter Bimba (Katell Laennec) is going through, and seemingly for lack of anything better two do, Andrea Caroli (Enzo Fisichella, PLAY MOTEL) consents to a séance to contact his late wife Daniela. The medium (Elisa Mainardi, FELLINI SATYRICON), however, senses an evil presence in the form of scandalous Caroli ancestress Lucrezia who calls out the hypocrisy of the current family: including Andrea's venal mother (Pupita Lea Scuderoni, SALON KITTY), sexpot sister-in-law Naïs (Patrizia Webley, RING OF DARKNESS) who is married to quadriplegic and catatonic Adolfo (Giuseppe Marrocco, EMANUELLE AROUND THE WORLD) and carrying on with the family lawyer Giorgio (Giancarlo Del Duca, CRY OF A PROSTITUTE), and even Andrea's own repressed self. After inflicting telekinetic destruction on the séance, the presence makes its way through the old castle's corridors and molests Adolfo's nurse Sister Sofia (Mariangela Giordano, THE SECT) before settling on young Bimba who starts calling the family pigs and behaving in a sexual manner (finding a new use for her large teddy bear and a phallic candle). As the family argue over whether Bimba is possessed or mentally ill – when they're not all boffing each other – Sister Sofia thinks the only way she can heal Bimba is with love and compassion, even if that means sacrificing her life… and possibly her virtue.

Mounted during the period of Italian exploitation when the mix of horror, giallo, and sexploitation briefly gave way to narrative hardcore films before splitting off into more mainstream horror and conventional porno, MALABIMBA with its gothic castle atmosphere – a highly recognizable location from BLOODY PIT OF HORROR, THE LICKERISH QUARTET, CRYPT OF HORROR, LADY FRANKENSTEIN, and many others – campy characters, and ugly hardcore inserts is the bridge between that secondary tier of films during the golden age of Italian gothic horror like VAMPIRE AND THE BALLERINA, BAMBOLA DI SATANA, and PLAYGIRLS AND THE VAMPIRE, the seventies stragglers like REINCARNATION OF ISABEL, NUDE FOR SATAN, and THE BLOODSUCKER LEADS THE DANCE, and the eighties last gasps like BURIAL GROUND, and particularly Mario Bianchi's remake SATAN'S BABY DOLL which had a more palpably oppressive atmosphere, more hardcore inserts, and in some ways improved on the story with the ghost of the girl's dead mother playing on the sexual weaknesses of the characters (with a zombie thrown in for good measure). MALABIMBA's horrors are fairly mild, being at its most successful as a campy comedy of manners with plenty of hypocrisy, greed, and most refreshingly Naïs not being a nympho but just sexually unfulfilled by men more interested in their own gratification and proudly proclaiming herself a whore to wind up her relatives. Giordano does the most with little to work with, turning in a sincere performance even when required to be groped by invisible hands or stupid enough to show her body to Bimba solely for the sake of curiosity. The 16mm photography by Franco Villa (CRIES AND SHADOWS) is colorful and occasionally elegant but mostly handheld and crude while the score features Elsio Mancuso (THE BIG BUST OUT) and Berto Pisano (THE GIRL IN ROOM 2A) cues recycled from Pisano's score for DEATH SMILES ON A MURDERER and some dating all the way back to the 1963 art horror film KATARSIS/SFIDA AL DIAVOLO, many of which would be recycled again in Bianchi's BURIAL GROUND. The film's producer Gabriele Crisanti, lover of actress Giordano, also gave us the sleazefests PATRICK STILL LIVES and GIALLO IN VENICE.

Unreleased in the United States, MALABIMBA was first released in a softcore version in Italy running 85 minutes and a version with hardcore inserts (88 minutes), the softcore version appearing on rental VHS and the hardcore version on a subsequent sell-through tape from Nocturno, which was presumably the source for Luminous Films & Video Wurks' subtitled bootleg DVD. When Severin Films released the film on DVD in 2009, they did so in an X-rated version – which allowed through branching the film to be viewed in its hardcore cut (88:13) entirely sourced from film, and in an integral version that restored some expository non-hardcore scenes from video sources, bringing the film's running time up to 97:54 – and an "unrated version" which was not the Italian softcore version but a cut-down of the X-rated version created by Severin running 86:43 with the branching option to watch it with the expository deleted scenes bringing the running time up to 96:21. Vinegar Syndrome was able to access the original 16mm camera negative which was stored in very poor condition but nevertheless was complete in terms of the added scenes and the hardcore inserts, running 100:28 (the running time difference presumably due to the PAL video sources used for the Severin composites). Although there is damage from the archiving in the form of stains and scratches, the presentation is generally quite clean after the credits (the end credits appear to be taken from another source), and colors can be quite rich at times (noticeable over the earlier releases is some cool blue lighting in the scene with the camera moving down the corridors, probably not so much gel lighting as daylight coming through the windows captured by tungsten-balanced film. The hardcore inserts still look uglier and grainier, but it is more apparent that they were shot later with the positions changing between the two intercut scenes. The Italian DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono track is pretty clean, calling attention to some of the music cues mixed lower on the track, but some bits of audio had to be patched in from video. Optional English subtitles are provided.

The film is accompanied by a new, lively audio commentary track by film historians and authors Samm Deighan, Heather Drain, and Kat Ellinger who discuss the film's gothic elements which are unusual for EXORCIST ripoffs apart from Alberto De Martino's THE ANTICHRIST/THE TEMPTER, how the film has been mischaracterized as nunsploitation, and the parallels between the film and Walerian Borowczyk's THE BEAST which also paints a portrait of decaying nobility at their most decadent and hypocritical – with Bimba's grandmother suggesting her son marry his brother's wife to "keep the money in the family" – and the contributions of screenwriter Piero Regnoli not only to this film but to Italian horror overall starting with Riccardo Freda's I VAMPIRI (finished by Mario Bava), noting that Regnoli had a few occult scripts in the works for Freda but ended up working for Renato Polselli and Alfredo Rizzo before Bianchi starting with CRY OF A PROSTITUTE and Crisanti with GIALLO IN VENICE/PATRICK STILL LIVES director Mario Landi's BATTON STORY, and later the Umberto Lenzi with NIGHTMARE CITY.