Tragic Ceremony - Dark Sky Films
By Al Kratina
February 14, 2008 - 15:29
Tragic Ceremony 
1972, Spain/Italy
Director: Riccardo Freda
Writers: Mario Bianchi, Jose Gutierrez Maesso, Leonardo Martin
Producers: Jose Gutierrez Maesso
Starring: Camille Keaton, Tony Isbert, Maximo Valverde, Luigi Pistilli
Genre: Horror
Rating: Not Rated
DVD Distributor: Dark Sky
Website: Buy it here
Running Time: 87 minutes
The problem with the Manson Family was that they weren’t very photogenic. I feel like they were kooky enough to make a good Monkeys-style TV show, but instead they turned into one big hippie boogeyman, entirely due to their appearance. Charlie Manson looked like Animal from The Muppet Show after rolling down a hill, and while some of the female groupies were attractive from a distance, up close they resembled homeless members of Hanson. Tragic Ceremony, however, rectifies this with an attractive young cast in this loose riff on the Manson crimes.
In the film, a group of teens are caught in the rain while idling away a summer day. Low on gas, they take shelter in a more garish version of the house from The Haunting. Sadly, the mansion’s occupants are neither the spirits nor the ghost hunters of the Robert Wise film, but rather the kind of carnival side show Satanists that exist only in Tales from the Crypt episodes and the fevered imagination of American talk radio. After the devil worshippers are foiled in an attempt to sacrifice one of the quick thinking teens, they turn on each other in an inexplicable orgy of violence. The teens flee, and are soon blamed for the deaths and falsely portrayed in the media as a Manson-esque cult, despite the fact that they kind of look like the Mystery, Inc kids from Scooby Doo. What’s worse, it seems like one or more of them have been possessed by the dark forces conjured by the magicians.
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In terms of the Satanic cycle of Italian exploitation filmmaking, Tragic Ceremony is a fairly tame entry. There are some bursts of violence in the early stages, and the odd shock in the final third, but for the most part, the film moves along at an amiable, goodnatured pace, like someone strolling through a screening of Lisa and the Devil on the way to Sunday brunch at a waffle house. The script is, of course, ridiculous, mistaking muddled confusion for artistic ambiguity. But what gore exists is fun, the story is diverting, and star Camille Keaton, of I Spit on Your Grave fame, is pleasant enough to look at. At least compared to Charlie Manson. And the Monkeys, come to think of it.
Rating: 7 on 10
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