Half a dozen years before she Spit on Your Grave, Camille Keaton toplined a supernatural slice of Italian horror titled Tragic Ceremony. In the film from Riccardo Freda (Murder Syndrome), Keaton’s plain Jane and her three guy friends of varying unlikability hop in a dune buggy after a rough-and-tough day of carefree yachting, only to run out of gas after evening falls and a downpour, well, pours. The foursome lucks upon a mansion whose owners, Lord and Lady Alexander (A Bay of Blood’s Luigi Pistilli and Thunderball’s Luciana Paluzzi), welcome them inside for cheese and salami and shelter with all the Gothic trimmings.
Late that night, the youths learn why the Alexanders are such gracious hosts: They’ve gathered their pals for a full-blown black mass, and require Jane as the pièce de résistance. (In other words, I think she is the subject of a sacrifice!) But her buddies put this party on ice and rescue her in the nick of time, albeit by having to commit murder to do so; the robed participants turn on one another, too, because when in Rome. Most notably, one guy takes a sword to the noggin, which immediately goes halfsies. I must not be the only one who finds this bisection (courtesy of effects wizard Carlo Rambaldi, 1976’s King Kong) the highlight of this sequence, because Freda later trots it out a couple more times for instant-replay kicks, making it this film’s equivalent of Sybil Danning’s infamous top-ripping scene in Howling II.
Then our quartet flees the house to safety. Whew! The end … except it’s not — Freda still has half a Ceremony to go! Unfortunately, coming after the misplaced climax, it’s the least interesting half.
The remainder finds death coming after Jane and the guys individually, Final Destination-style, to finish what it started. At least another of Rambaldi’s nifty gore gags pops up (look out for the grooming scene!), so it’s not as if the movie totally withdrawals its syringe of cheap pleasures on this downward slope. It does, however, unravel into a mess of an ending upon an ending upon an ending, as needlessly convoluted as Tragic Ceremony’s original title in its native Italy: Extracted from the Secret Police Archives of a European Capital. —Rod Lott