Following the release of Pier Paolo Pasolini's THE DECAMERON, Italian audiences were besieged by a number of low-rent knock-offs, the so-called "decamerotici" of the 1970s. While the more ambitious of these staked out new and compelling territory (e.g., the delightful Edwige Fenech vehicle UBALDA, ALL NAKED AND WARM), most, like PUT YOUR DEVIL INTO MY HELL, were content to dress a few starlets in period clothes, bluff their way through a half-baked script, and call it a day.
Taking its title from the bawdy punchline to a Boccaccio tale featured in Pasolini's film (how's that for idea theft?), DEVIL follows the not-too-interesting adventures of Riccardo, a trickster and ne'er-do-well intent on bedding the most beautiful and prominent women of a small Italian village. First seen as an artist, he's attempting to make love to the mayor's wife while painting her portrait. When the mayor gets wind that a papal convention in Rome is set to draw religious dignitaries from throughout Europe, he seizes on the idea of promoting increased tourism by re-routing traffic from the nearby villages. As clerics from all over begin parading through the remote town, plenty of opportunities for bawdy shenanigans arise as the townspeople strive to meet their lecherous needs.
As the above probably makes clear, the film is a bit schizophrenic in its attempt to marry two different plots, neither of which is well developed. Riccardo's philandering, for instance, is the stuff of innumerable Italian sex farces, but there's no center to make it stick: no thrill of forbidden romance, etc. Similarly, the set-up of the various hypocritical and over-sexed religious figures heading through town is a solid one, but the film doesn't do much with it: it mostly contents itself to let them grope a few of the women (dressed as nuns to mimic a monastery for them to bed down in) and call it a day. There's one funny (though certainly dated) section of gay-panic humor about a group of Germans, but that's about it.
Anyone looking for the kind of lusty, joyous omnibus delivered by Pasolini will be sorely disappointed, even accounting for the fact that attempting to compare BLACK EMANUELLE director Bitto Albertini to the illustrious PPP is like putting up a pound of ground chuck against a Porterhouse. There are no spritely, playful tales here, no memorable characters, just a lackluster narrative that barely manages to reach a coherent conclusion, while Pasolini was busy using a similar set-up to interrogate the very nature of storytelling itself, in between all the playful shenanigans. The gulf between the two is as vast as between Heaven and Hell - would that Albertini had put a bit more of the former into the latter.
