QUEENS OF EVIL, the film that perhaps best exemplifies Mondo Macabro as a genre comes to Blu-ray from the company of the same name.

David (Raymond Lovelock, THE LIVING DEAD AT MANCHESTER MORGUE) is a hippie biker cruising along a coastal country road who comes across a Rolls Royce with a flat tire. David replaces the tire while enduring an ultra-conservative lecture from its bourgeois owner (Gianni Santuccio) who ridicules David’s hippie values which the driver is certain will fall by the wayside when he meets a beautiful woman. David finds his good deed rewarded with a nail in his tire as the Rolls Royce drives off. David pursues and causes the car to crash into a tree. Seeing a police siren in the distance, David flees the scene on his bike and turns off onto a dirt road and sleeps in a woodshed for the night. The next morning, he is discovered by Liv (Haydée Politoff, COUNT DRACULA'S GREAT LOVE) and her two older sisters Bibiana (Evelyn Stewart, MURDER MANSION) and Samantha (Silvia Monti, LIZARD IN A WOMAN'S SKIN) who invite him into their storybook cottage which is decorated with ceiling high black and white portraits of each of the women, sixties bachelor-pad décor, and decadent multi-tiered cakes for breakfast. In a series of vignettes in idyllic settings, these three fantasy women seduce him and manage to keep him hooked in spite of hints of odd behavior, but he ultimately discovers that there is a high price to be paid for renouncing his values.

Director Tonino Cervi was better known the producer of Michelangelo Antonioni’s RED DESERT, the omnibus BOCCACCIO '70, Domenico Paolella's nunsploitation duo THE STORY OF A CLOISTERED NUN and THE NUN AND THE DEVIL, as well as Gianfranco Giagni’s intriguing eighties Italian horror THE SPIDER LABYRINTH. He only sat in the director's chair a handful of times including the Dario Argento-scripted western TODAY IT'S ME, TOMORROW YOU, the melodrama NEST OF VIPERS, the Alberto Sordi period comedy L'AVARO, and the eighties erotic drama THE NAKED SUN. Although there is sex – Lovelock is shown nude while the women's nudity is only seen indirectly perhaps as much as the make-up, wigs, and clothing to suggest the hero's ultimate inability to know these women behind the image they present to him – and some ferocious bloodshed at the end, QUEENS OF EVIL is less of a softcore seventies drama or a horror film than a macabre fairy tale – the subtitle on the Italian title cards IL DELITTO DEL DIAVOLO and LE REGINE is "favola thrilling" or a thrilling fable – with what can either be described as a middle-aged attitude about hippies or perhaps just an attack on a certain type of person who embraces the hippie lifestyle as merely in opposition to the "propriety." David quips that to be faithful to one woman would mean being unfaithful to every other woman, but it is when David is brought to a party at nearby castle to be gawked at by "those who count" that he seems to have no real convictions or even opinions on art, love, the third world, or any other topics the guests hurl at him (with the assumption that his opinions must be the opposite of theirs). On the other hand, the titular "crime of the devil" might be the effort to destroy youthful optimism and free-thinking to keep sex a sin and foster various vices. He refers to his agents as "conjurers" while one responds that they are "hidden persuaders" after the Vance Packard book on the world of advertising in a manner that makes the film an ideal double bill with THEY'VE CHANGED FACES in which Dracula becomes businessman Giovanni Nosferatu who exerts his malign influence through consumerism. Cervi's direction lacks much in the way of organic flourishes, its artistic touches being as determined as the script's dialogue – musical flourish here, soft focus here, echo effect there – with the photography of Sergio Offizi (HOUSE BY THE EDGE OF THE PARK) capturing the Jean Bouquin fashions, wigs, and make-up more so than weaving a spell of its own. The score of Angelo Francisco Lavagnino (SOMETHING CREEPING IN THE DARK) emphasizes the fairytale aspect with interjections from Lovelock himself with the unforgettable hippie ballad "I Love You Underground."

Unreleased in the United States, QUEENS OF EVIL was most accessible on the gray market in the form of boots of a 1983 British pre-cert cassette which featured a fair fullscreen transfer (not to be confused with QUEEN OF EVIL, the British release and cassette title for Oliver Stone's SEIZURE). The English version and the Italian version – available on a letterboxed sellthrough cassette from the newsstand label Shendene – ran approximately ninety minutes at 24fps while the first DVD release from Japan came from a PAL-converted French master that ran 86 minutes converted to 24fps. We have not seen the Italian DVD from the CineKult label. Mondo Macabro's 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.85:1 widescreen transfer mastered from a 4K scan of the original negative from the French licensor appears to be a composite of HD and SD sources that comes to a running time in between the French and Italian/export cuts at 88:04. Since the stretch of end music over a black screen is retained, the differences can probably be explained by the fact that the French and Italian cuts had could scenes which were edited differently (with alternate versions of two in the extras) and smaller differences of a few seconds or frames here and there. The film is not all that explicit, but all of the nudity and bloodshed is intact while nothing else "feels" missing. The Italian DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono track sounds better than the English DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono track which has been digitally cleaned up, but the English track's dialogue is occasionally more poetic compared to the English subtitle translation of the Italian.

The film is accompanied by an audio commentary by film historians Kat Ellinger and Samm Deighan in which they cite the film and a handful of others like THE SLAVE and THE FRIGHTENED WOMAN as being only classifiable as the genre "Mondo Macabro." They discuss Lovelock's "professional hippie phase" of his career, noting that there were many shades to the character type as seen in this film and THE LIVING DEAD AT MANCHESTER MORGUE, and discuss the ways in which the story is open to various interpretations whether it is mocking hippies or capitalism; indeed, they also put the film in the context of films in which the genre is used to satirize capitalism like the aforementioned HANNO CAMBIATO FACCIA as well as noting that films like QUEENS OF EVIL did not directly engage with the cultural climate of Italy's "years of lead" in the manner of the polizio films but is indeed informed by it.