Malabimba, the Malicious Whore (1979)

Malabimba, the Malicious Whore is often dismissed as yet another 1970s Italian rip-off of The Exorcist, but the similarities are actually purely superficial. This is a typically over-the-top slice of Italian horror eurosleaze, which is fortunately just the sort of thing I enjoy!

Andrea Karoli has some problems. The family is wealthy, but the wealth is mostly in the hands of his brother Adolfo. Adolfo is more or less bed-ridden and cannot speak. Andrea’s mother wants him to marry his sister-in-law Nais when Adolfo dies, to keep the family money in the family. But Andrea is still mourning the death of his wife, and isn’t interested. Despite Nais’s constant sexual taintings. Nais sexually taunts everyone, and her special pleasure is to torment a man enough to persuade him to give her the sort of rough sex she craves.

Andrea has even bigger problems than this. There’s his 16-year-old daughter Bimba. Bimba is going through a difficult stage. A difficult stage that involves wandering about naked and talking dirty at the dinner table for starters, but soon progresses to much greater heights (or depths) of depravity. She also has a tendency to speak in a strange slightly gravelly voice, a voice that sounds too deep and too old for her. Is it possibly that something happened during the séance at the beginning of the film, when the medium made contact with Andrea’s dead wife?

Bimba’s hobby is watching other people having sex, and she tries to persuade her aunt Sofiato join her in these innocent pleasures. Her aunt, being a nun, isn’t keen but is eventually persuaded. Sofia is hoping to save Bimba, but Bimba has other disturbing habits. Like trying to persuade Sofia out of her habit and into Bimba’s bed. Bimba also likes to have sex with her teddy bear.

As you might expect events start to spiral out of control as Bimba becomes more and more sexually obsessed. Meanwhile Nais has managed to get Andrea into her bed for some hot sex, proceedings that are watched with interest by Bimba and her aunt the nun.

Since both films deal with the possession of a teenage girl the comparisons to The Exorcist are obvious, but really they’re too obvious. Bimba is not possessed by Satan, or by demons, but by the spirit of her deceased mother. And that spirit wants to corrupt Aunt Sofia, who had apparently rejected her sexual advances when she was alive. And while The Exorcist is little more than religious propaganda, a dire warning about the dangers of the Evil One, in Malabimba the possession is much more overtly sexual in nature. It’s a movie about the horrors of adolescence and the sexual turmoil that it brings rather than being movie about the Devil.

Malabimba is certainly a whole lot sleazier than The Exorcist. I saw the unrated version, but there’s also an even sleazier version with hardcore inserts which were added later (a fate that befell quite a few eurohorror movies). The unrated version is more than sleazy enough. And while it’s an unashamed piece of sexploitation Malabimba is also a whole lot more entertaining than The Exorcist, and not just because of the copious quantities of sex and nudity. It’s also a more interesting movie. The idea of adolescence, malevolent possession and sexual obsession being intimately linked works well.

The acting is mostly reasonably good. Katell Laennec as Bimba is the standout performer, in what was unfortunately her only movie role. She’s truly remarkable, managing to achieve just the right combination of innocence and depravity.

Severin have done a fine job as usual with the DVD release.

This is a fun combination of sex, sleaze and genuine horror combined with considerable flair by director Andrea Bianchi. What more could you want?