Enzo G. Castellari wasn't too happy with how this movie was made or how it ended up.
According to Robert Curti's Italian Gothic Horror Films, 1970-1979, he had become friends with a young writer named Jose Sanchez, who he was mentoring and had hired as an assistant. The script for this film was being produced in Spain and if they used Castellari's name, there was a better chance the film would be made. However, in the credits, Jose Maria Nunes is the credited writer and Sanchez is an actor. But who are we to test the memory of the man who made Great White?
Castellari said, "Distributor Rodolfo Putignani and his associate Curti finished it their own way. But my name as director stayed." They changed the name to Sensivita and it was released as Diabla in Spain. But they weren't done. Seven years later, Alfonso Brescia was brought in to shoot new scenes, which Castellari saw years later at a horror convention. He laughed it off, saying, "After six minutes I walked out of the theater, horrified." That new edit was released under the title Kyra - The Lady of the Lake.
Whatever the end result is, you know that I'm going to get excited by a movie that starts with a bloody hand that rises from a lake and drowns a woman, much less one about the occult secrets of a home being investigated by Lilian (Leonora Fani, Hotel Fear) who wanders the lake where her mother drowned and then finds a toad in her bed.
There's also her sister - well, spoiler warning, sorry - Lilith (Patricia Adriani) who is a witch who lives in a cave that is constantly studying all of the symbols all over the area. She's also connected to her sister in the way that all Italian exploitation films connect people. Yes, it's sex. As Lillian makes love to a man, Lilith feels what she feels. They both pass out from a movie orgasm while the man drives off and immediately dies in a car crash. This is cinema.
Lilith can also speak to the woman inside the lake, who is named Kyra. There's also a little blind girl who has more headless dolls than she knows what to do with, an axe murderer, Vincent Gardenia as a painter, a village filled with people in giant masks and Antonio Mayans shows up in a non-Jess Franco movie. I was beside myself with sheer happiness and that's before the ending where the two leads have a clothes-destroying girl-on-girl fight to the death.
Why has this not yet been placed on blu ray and upgraded and presented with scholarly commentary tracks that pretend that it's art instead of lurid Italian exploitation filmmaking - which is art, so this is a double positive and hey, physical media companies, I will totally record that commentary track - and man, I've been super down as of late and then a movie like this crosses my path and I have to think, "I live in a world where the cosmic coincidences or simulation that created my reality eventually led to thousands of years of evolution which eventually produced this, a film of staggering achievement that literally ones of people are obsessed over."
According to Robert Curti's Italian Gothic Horror Films, 1970-1979, he had become friends with a young writer named Jose Sanchez, who he was mentoring and had hired as an assistant. The script for this film was being produced in Spain and if they used Castellari's name, there was a better chance the film would be made. However, in the credits, Jose Maria Nunes is the credited writer and Sanchez is an actor. But who are we to test the memory of the man who made Great White?
Castellari said, "Distributor Rodolfo Putignani and his associate Curti finished it their own way. But my name as director stayed." They changed the name to Sensivita and it was released as Diabla in Spain. But they weren't done. Seven years later, Alfonso Brescia was brought in to shoot new scenes, which Castellari saw years later at a horror convention. He laughed it off, saying, "After six minutes I walked out of the theater, horrified." That new edit was released under the title Kyra - The Lady of the Lake.
Whatever the end result is, you know that I'm going to get excited by a movie that starts with a bloody hand that rises from a lake and drowns a woman, much less one about the occult secrets of a home being investigated by Lilian (Leonora Fani, Hotel Fear) who wanders the lake where her mother drowned and then finds a toad in her bed.
There's also her sister - well, spoiler warning, sorry - Lilith (Patricia Adriani) who is a witch who lives in a cave that is constantly studying all of the symbols all over the area. She's also connected to her sister in the way that all Italian exploitation films connect people. Yes, it's sex. As Lillian makes love to a man, Lilith feels what she feels. They both pass out from a movie orgasm while the man drives off and immediately dies in a car crash. This is cinema.
Lilith can also speak to the woman inside the lake, who is named Kyra. There's also a little blind girl who has more headless dolls than she knows what to do with, an axe murderer, Vincent Gardenia as a painter, a village filled with people in giant masks and Antonio Mayans shows up in a non-Jess Franco movie. I was beside myself with sheer happiness and that's before the ending where the two leads have a clothes-destroying girl-on-girl fight to the death.
Why has this not yet been placed on blu ray and upgraded and presented with scholarly commentary tracks that pretend that it's art instead of lurid Italian exploitation filmmaking - which is art, so this is a double positive and hey, physical media companies, I will totally record that commentary track - and man, I've been super down as of late and then a movie like this crosses my path and I have to think, "I live in a world where the cosmic coincidences or simulation that created my reality eventually led to thousands of years of evolution which eventually produced this, a film of staggering achievement that literally ones of people are obsessed over."
