Reviewed by

Christopher Armstead

It had been a while since I’d seen a good ‘ol 1970’s Italian exploitation flick which got me to wondering why do all these exploitation flicks come of out Italy anyway? Can a film historian out there inform me why the Italian film industry was the hot bed of sleazy horror flicks, sex farces, drama’s or whatever genre, with the emphasis on ‘sleazy’? I’m not aware of Spanish or German or British 1970’s sleaze… at least not to the level that Italians were pumping it out. We Yanks put out some pretty good sleaze too but given a choice I’ll pick Italian sleaze as the most consistently entertaining exploitative sleaze in the history of the planet earth. Today we’re watching some ‘Exorcist’ style exploitation in director Andrea Bianchi’s ‘Malabimba: The Malicious Whore’.

Our film opens in an Italian castle as some loons are sitting around a table while a crazy looking wild-eyed lady is performing a séance. It is possible that they explained to me why they were doing this séance but I totally missed that part or it was lost by me somewhere in the subtitled translation. Things don’t go so well in this particular séance as the evil spirit busts all up in the crib, starts undoing one cats pants, rips off the top of the voluminous Ms. Nais (Patrizia Welby) and then darts around the castle looking for someone to possess.

The first stop on this evil spirits quest would be the room of Sister Sofia (Mariangela Giordano) and it was looking like the spirit was getting the best of Sister Sofia causing the nun to start digging into her panties but the force is strong in that nun and she kicks that evil spirit right on out. Undaunted our evil spirit then travels to the room of sixteen year old Bimba (Katell Leannac). Bimba, a sweet innocent and sheltered girl, isn’t nearly as strong as Sister Sofia and now our spirit has a young, tight, and fresh host to do some damage in this dysfunctional castle.

Issues run deep in this castle with Bimba’s father and widowed patriarch Andrea (Enzo Fischella) falling upon hard times while his shrew of a mother urges his son to start sleeping with his slutty sister-in-law Nais. Enzo’s brother is trapped in a coma / or paralyzed or something which is causing the slutty Nais to pursue the uptight Andrea who apparently has problem with sleeping with his paralyzed brothers wife. Principles which I’m thinking he will get over in the very near future. Things are greatly complicated by the once shy Bimba using language that would make Larry Flynt blush, attempting to molest the doting Sister Sofia, peeping in on the slutty Nais having sex with every single male in the castle, exposing herself to party guests and we won’t even get into what Malimba did to that poor teddy bear or her pathetic paralyzed comatose uncle.

Somebody needs to get that evil spirit out of poor Bimba, an evil spirit named Lucretia who I STILL don’t know where she came from. Sister Sofia knows Lucretia though and she’s the only one who can save her. But is she willing to pay the price?

I learned a couple of the very critical things while watching ‘Malabimba: The Malicious Whore’. I learned that if you are paralyzed and in a coma, receiving a blow job will bring you back to consciousness and make you sit up. Now before we start dispatching nursing assistants to do extra duty to end paralysis and coma’s, apparently it will also kill you. We call that ‘give and take’ where I come from. I also learned that if you have an evil spirit locked inside you the quickest way to transfer that spirit from person to another is for the possessed to jam one’s fist into the non-possessed vagina. If you don’t have a vagina then you might want to use your imagination. And lastly I learned that a nun knowing the sexual pleasure is worse than death.

When a movie educates you the way ‘Malimba’ has educated me it is hard for me to denigrate it. In addition to being educational Malimba was one the better acted Italian sleaze fests I’ve ever seen with star Kattel Leannec doing fine work as the repressed teenage whore in what is listed as her one and only role.

Yes the narrative was incredibly silly and there were times I couldn’t make heads or tails as to what was going on but that didn’t take away from the relatively high production values that this movie had or the fact that it was oddly watchable and reasonably engrossing from start to finish.

There was the issue of the hardcore sex inserts. So you have some actors engaging in some obvious fake sex, as movies of this type tends to have, then out of the blue you’re watching what looks like stock footage closeups of hard core sex. I’m thinking the only person who could’ve remotely found these inserts interesting is a gynecology med student because they weren’t titillating, they didn’t match the actors or the scenery around them, and it certainly didn’t help clear up the muddled story line. Apparently this was done simply because they could.

Regardless, as far as nonsensical Italian sleaze movies goes ‘Malimba: The Malicious Whore’… and the whore was quite malicious… is one of the better movies that the genre has to offer. I’m not saying it’s good now… but better.