Raise your hand if you ever heard of director Fauzi Mansur. Anyone? Well, me neither, but this undoubtedly awesome man seemingly had a flourishing career in his native country Brazil, with lots of exploitation/thrillers during the 70s and hardcore pornography flicks during the 80s. Then, somewhat out of the blue, he unleashed two smutty splatter flicks that gained a modest but solid cult status among fans of extreme horror cinema; - your truly included!
"Ritual of Death" is insane! It's basically the epitome of bad B-horror, with a senseless plot and terrible amateur-acting, but at the same time tremendously entertaining thanks to the unhinged gore-effects, gratuitous sleaze, absurd randomness, and the misplaced song choices. My best guess is that Fauzi Mansur probably watched a lot of body-melt trash flicks and Italian splatter movies (in particular those of Lucio Fulci) throughout the 1980s, and then ambitiously gathered all his friends and family members to help realize his own dream-project. Well done, Fauzi! I hope you had as much fun making "Ritual of Death" as me and my movie-buddy had watching it.
Word of warning: the first 15-20 minutes of the film are dull, vague, slow, and inconceivable. There's overlong and repetitive footage of an Egyptian ceremonial rite, constant flash-appearances of a sinister Ray Milland lookalike, and a lecture from a daft professor. Once you struggle through this, however, the gooey madness breaks loose. The pompous producer of a theater group asks his lead actor to steal a rare manuscript from the local library, because he wants to make a stage play out of it. By doing so, the actor - Brad - becomes possessed by an evil spirit that causes his facial skin to spurt white goo and his mouth to cough up liquid Smurfs. He also uncontrollably slaughters all the members of the theater group in the most grotesquely nauseating ways imaginable. Highlights include hot (but hilariously incompetent) actresses getting smashed to pieces by a claw hammer or getting their stomach sliced open by a train wheel, and a dumb jock getting chipped by the propeller of a wind machine. There's even a guy whose eyeballs pop out of the sockets while he's being drowned in a bathtub. I didn't know that was possible, but I'm sure Lucio Fulci must have been jealous of this scene.
I'm following the same logic as my good buddy BA_Harrison here. "Ritual of Death" remains a bad film that honestly doesn't deserve a rating higher than four, but since the women are so pretty and the splatter is so darn exhilarating, I'm giving it a six. Hell yeah, I am.
