Psychedelic soft-erotic exploitation movies were an inexplicably popular trend amongst European directors back in the late 60's and early 70's. This generally pointless sub genre of horror consists of movies that basically don't have any plots, but are stuffed with trendy looking women parading around naked and fetishist escapades that all healthy heterosexual males are supposed to fantasize about. Yeah, right
I don't know about you, but I surely never dreamed of sadomasochistic rubber dolls or Nazi elimination squads. The list of these oddball movies is long and contains efforts from several acclaimed directors, like Mario Bava's "Lisa and the Devil", Jess Franco's "Succubus", Massimo Dallamano's "Venus in Furs", Umberto Lenzi's "Orgasmo" and Piero Schivazappa's "The Laughing Woman". "Baba Yaga" also fits into this category, but here the script was inspired by an eccentric comic books series courtesy of Guido Crepax. Basically this means that "Baby Yaga" is even weirder and more flamboyant than all the other psychedelic sex flicks mentioned here above. During a live and personal presentation of his film, at a festival in my home country Belgium, director Corrando Farina explained that he tried to translate as many comic book elements to the screen as possible, but that it certainly wasn't easy due to budgetary restriction and uncooperative producers and censorship. Still, no matter what Farina claims, nothing can divert the attention away from the fact that "Baba Yaga" is a dull and utterly incoherent movie. I didn't spot any artistic style elements at all and the hallucinogenic footage is just a bunch of randomly scraped together and irrelevant sleaze. Isabelle De Funès (Louis' yummy niece, apparently) stars as a liberated photographer in Milan. Late one night and following only a brief encounter, she reluctantly becomes the object of obsession of the funnily named lesbian witch Baba Yaga (Carroll Baker). The deranged hag turns Valentina's camera into a murder device, transfigures her best friend into an SM-doll, inflicts eerie nightmares on her and eventually lures the poor girl to an abandoned mansion with nasty sewing machines and bottomless pits. In case you're looking for significance, symbolism or possibly even an explanation, I'm afraid I have to discourage you straight away. Everything that happens in "Baba Yaga" happens for absolutely NO reason and the film finishes just as void as it begun. To round up with at least a couple of positive remarks, I really liked the music and both Isabella De Funès and Ely Galleani are stunningly beautiful ladies to look at. George Eastman (as the heroine's clueless boyfriend) is good too, but I definitely prefer the roles he played in his later career as they were practically all villainous.
