Thursday, July 25, 2013

Rifftrax: La Cattiva Aldilà (The Bad Afterlife)




In 1960, Anita Ekberg seduced the world by dancing in a fountain during La Dolce Vita.
Nine years later, she tried to do the same thing in a very cheap and terrible Eurotrash horror movie where the curvy vampires out-seduced her. This was before botox.

Rifftrax got a hold of Fangs of the Living Dead, and tried to stake it in its tracks. As I said before, the gang at Incognito Cinema Warriors XP are more skilled towards these types of movies. Still, Rifftrax's take has plenty of fresh riffs plus a couple of callbacks.

Ekberg plays Sylvia, the most beautiful model in Italy (or at least the movie's version of Italy). After her mom dies, she finds out she's about to inherit a title and a castle in some fake country called Waldrick. When she comes to town, mainly a Hammer horror movie set that has seen better days, the town seems to be stunned to see her. She gets a ride to the castle (Bill Corbett: "And hiding in the grass, evil...shrubbery"), and is met by some creepy uncle, Count Hipster. While she changes hairstyles as much as she changes clothes, she insists she learn about her family's history, especially her mother. Their discussion is marked by a lot of overacting, while he spins some tale about Sylvia being the image of her grandmother, who tampered in God's domain and was burned by the ignorant townsfolk. The upside to all this is that she supposedly turned Uncle Creepy into a vampire.

She also has to deal with Blinka, who apparently is close to the uncle, and Berta, a barmaid who also joins the undead...or not undead. Uncle Creepy then tells Sylvia to cancel her wedding plans, and stay in the castle forever. He demands she drink his blood to seal the deal...and admit he looks like Peter O'Toole.
See, the uncle eventually admits it's all part of a plot to drive Sylvia insane so that he can keep the castle. Not telling her about the castle would have been easier. The uncle uses his sexy "vampires" and the worst shadow puppetry ever to scare away Sylvia's fiancé Pietro and his dumb friend Max.
This leads to a final twist that renders the whole movie as meaningless, although not as badly as the ending to The Bermuda Triangle.

Some examples:

Sylvia sees Blinka as a vampire, or least her teeth:

Blinka: "She never should have seen me this way. She'll always be afraid of me now."
Kevin Murphy: Together, we could have ruled Cinemax soft-core

Pietro, Sylvia's fiancé, reads a history of Waldrick:  "In the village of Waldrick, they talk nothing except vampires, about the dead leaving their graves."
Mike Nelson:  As long as the dead don't move to the Pacific Northwest and go to high school, I'm fine with that.

The old doctor warns of "an insatiable blood sucker"
Mike: Oh my God, Nancy Grace? Get the holy water!

The town is worried Berta has turned into a vampire:
Old Doc:  Something much more terrible than death happened to her
Kevin: She went to see AfterEarth.

There's also riffs on Zooey Deschanel, Jabba the Hutt, Game of Thrones, Ed Wood, Amway, The Wicker Man, Shia Lebouf, Hacksaw Jim Duggan...and a recent addition to the Rifftrax library.

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