PUT YOUR DEVIL INTO MY HELL (1973)
AKA Metti lo diavolo tuo ne lo mio inferno
Label: Full Moon Features
Region Code: Region-Free
Rating: Unrated
Duration: 86 Minutes
Audio: English-dubbed Dolby Digital 2.0 and 5.1 (No Subtitles)
Video: 1080p HD Widescreen (1.66:1)
Director: Bitto Albertini
Cast: Piera Viotti, Margaret Rose Keil, Antonio Cantafora, Melinda Pillon
Directed by Bitto Albertini (Black Emanuelle) the Italian sex-comedy Put Your Devil Into My Hell (1972) is set in the late 13th century, a medieval slice of the juvenile bawdiness that tells the comedic softcore tale of perpetually horny master painter named Ricciardetto (Antonio Cantafora, Demons 2); who is obsessed with sleeping with the lovely Monna Elisa (Piera Viotti, The French Sex Murders), the younger wife of Francisco, the mayor of the village, played by Giorgio Bixio who is the secret weapon of thew flick, he's so animated and funny looking, and I loved his English-dubbed voice, he just cracked me up.
Other escapades include the village deciding to lure religious pilgrimage tourists away from the neighboring town to enrich themselves, which sees them appoint lothario
Ricciardetto as the head of hospitality and tourism. He enacts a plan that has them sabotage the only bridge to the neighboring village, thereby eliminating the competition, and then transforming their own God-forsaken village into a desirable destination. This requires a facelift, including a fresh coat of paint on the shops and friary, and turning the ironsmith shop into a tavern and dressing up a couple of local prostitutes as nuns to entertain a visiting cardinal (Mario De Vico, Sister Emanuelle) and his clergy.
Other farcical happenings include Ricciardetto, along with his pals Martuccio (Mimmo Baldi, The Exorcist: Italian Style) and Monte Lucio, aiding and abetting each other in their convoluted pursuits of lust. This includes distracting one of the town's wealthy patrons named Geppino (Luca Sportelli,
Knife of Ice) away from his lovely wife Monna Violetta (Melinda Pillon), with the buxom beauty Beatrice, so that Monte Lucio can get some alone time with her. Monte Lucio disguises himself as a crippled pauper and an out-of-work peasant to get close to her, and the bait and switch they use to distract her husband involves a bit of bestiality!
Other horny escapades include Ricciardetto quenching the fires of Hell of a young woman with his whopper of a red devil while posing as a saint named John Thomas Longyard; plus we have the arrival of a Cardinal and his Clergy who are boarded with a bunch of whores dressed masquerading as nuns, which of course ends in the Cardinal, his clergy and the friars indulging in some mortal sin. The various religious factions here are certainly painted as morally corrupt, with a friar (Mario Frera, Magnum Cop) coming across a naked maiden tied to a tree in the forest, the victim of a sexual assault, and instead of freeing her he takes the opportunity to indulge himself. Eventually Ricciardetto's pursuit of the mayor's wife land his and Martuccio's essential organs on the chopping block, only to be saved by the greatest sinner in all of Europe, the saintly Duchess Amalasunta (Margaret Rose Keil, The Police Are Blundering in the Dark). Plus we have a smattering of scatalogical and gay humor, and some sight-gags to spice the sex-shenanigans up.
Put Your Devil Into My Hell (1973) is the sort of morally questionable and non-PC sex romp that just wouldn't and couldn't be made today, but that it is executed with no small amount of silliness is a bit of saving grace. It also helps that that the film is laden with gorgeous nude European beauties every couple of minutes. The title of the film is a reference to a passage from Giovanni Boccaccio's The Decameron, it having inspired the sexual euphemism “putting the devil back into hell”, which is repeated several times throughout the film, and it made me giggle a little each time, because obviously I'm still a little kid at heart that gets a kick out of dirty word play and naked ladies.
Audio/Video: Put Your Devil Into My Hell (1972) arrives on region-free Blu-ray from Full Moon Features presenting the film "for the very first time in North America, totally uncut and stunningly remastered from the original camera negative", in 1080p HD and framed in 1.66:1 widescreen. The image looks quite good with a fine layer of film grain throughout that offers modest depth and fine detail. Skin tones are warm and colors are well-saturated. Occasionally it will lapse into short segments that are lower resolution nd looked to be taken from a lower quality source source, such as a table scene at the 9:33 minute mark (as can be seen in screen cap 11 at the bottom of the review), but these come and go rather quickly.
Audio comes by way of compressed/lossy English Dolby Digital 2.0 and 5.1 surround with no subtitles options. The English-sub can be a bit sketchy at times but it did the job, but it's uneven and the acoustics of it are not high-grade. There are no extras on the disc save for a selection of Euro-cult Trailers.
The single-disc release arrives in a standard keepcase with a single sided sleeve of artwork featuring the original movie poster illustration and the same artwork is excerpted onto the Blu-ray disc.
Special Features:
- Euro-Cult Trailers: Naked Girl Murdered in the Park (2 min), Barbed Wire Dolls (1 min), Love Letters To A Portuguese Nun (3 min), Satanic Sisters (1 min), Voodoo Passion (1 min), Women In Cell Block 9 (1 min)
Put Your Devil Into My Hell (1973) is a ribald Italian sex comedy that would make a solid double-bill with Charles Band's own medieval sex-comedy/musical Fairy Tales (1978). This was formerly a pretty rare flick to find, it's not a film I have ever even heard referenced before and I could not find it streaming legit anywhere online, so kudos to Full Moon for unearthing this one on disc, it's an entertaining euro-cult curio worth seeking out for the softcore-kinky inclined.
Screenshots from the Full Moon Blu-ray:
