Not to be confused with The Rocky Horror Picture Show in any way, shape or form, this obscenely titled Italian titty twister is better served under any one of it's alternate titles. In fact, the incredibly cute girl at Virgin who recommended this flick to me did so under it's The Sexorcist moniker. Yeah, I know, when a woman you've never met before is suggesting movies to you based on scenes of explicit sexual content and they've using alternate titles like "Sexorcist", it's because they want to slap the proverbial leather with you... hence why I took her in the back and gave her a round trip ticket on the Death God Express... to which she was very disappointed to find that it was non-refundable.

Claiming to be based on a true story (see Fistula's review for Exorcism to see the Tomb's stand on movies baring such bullshit), EMHS is the tale of Danila, an incredibly talented and astute art major whose opinions and insight on the world of pretentious finger-painting ninnies is highly regarded by everyone in the area (somewhere in Italy... every place in Italy's pretty interchangeable with the exception of Venice, so let's just say that it's not Venice...), including her boyfriend Carlo. D-Slice is called in by her beau to advise him on a recent purchase he intends to make. Seems a local church has been deconsecrated (i.e. unholified) after recent discoveries that it was used as a love den for church going swingers in the area during the 1800s. Hey, trust me, God loves an orgy and those guys were just going their hole-y duties, harhar.

Since everything in the building is now considered evil and dirty and probably covered in 100 year old DNA, it's all being sold off (I'm using the holy water dish for a bedpan as I type this!), including several large wooden statues of crucified figures. Though the Jesus statue's already been grabbed up by a collector (probably to sell on eBay), Carlo's got his eyes on one of the other figures. After glancing over them, Danila picks out one in particular to which she says the sculpture seemed to have poured his very soul into while crafting it (*wink*wink*) and which, just one year earlier, sent a tourist screaming from the church cursing the figure as being the creation of the Devil himself. Carlo slaps down the green (or whatever color Italian money is) and the statue's shipped back to Carlo's studio. I'd like to say something funny to end this paragraph on so I can cut to the next scene, but there isn't anything really amusing to put here... sorry.

Later that night, Danni's forced to attend one of her parents' stuffy snob parties that rich people have (because they're rich and like to remind everyone of that fact) and, while apparently walking around in her mom's giant closet or through some kind of secret wall passage (not sure where the fuck she's supposed to be to be honest), she witness her mom makin' the nasty (man, and I do mean nasty... uggh!) with a rather hairy and unattractive gentleman who's not her husband. Though D doesn't wait around to witness any actually penetration, there should be a significant amount of mental trauma from what she does see, as mom's greasy lover showers her in rose petals and proceeds to whip her torso profusely with the thorny stems... Okay, I get the whole "beauty and pain" fetish (I wish I didn't, but I do), that's fine by me. The part that freaks me out is how this smoking hot middle aged mom (I guarantee you Lucretia Love can't be older than her early 30s here) would want it done to her by such a dirty, goofy toothed asshat like this guy! He puts the "ike" in "yikes"!... whatever that means.

Disgusted by her whorish madre, D-Swiss cuts from the partay early bird style and heads back to Carlo's studio to work on her latest painting. While there, she's got her back turned to the crazy crucifixion statue for 5 minutes and the damn thing goes and comes to life on her! Well, if that don't beat all, the wooden figure turned grinning date rapist walks over to her, rips Danila's dress right off of her, pushes her to ground, drops his loincloth and beats his sword into a plowshare (or is it his spear into a pruning hook?) with which to till Dani's fields in a Missionary Mambo that includes lightning and fire exploding around them! Yowza! I just hope she doesn't get a splinter...

After the sexy heretical ordeal with the horny Lincoln Log™, Danni awakens as if from a (wet) dream and heads home, half terrified and half achin' for a good boning. She figures it was all just a nightmare until she starts hearing footsteps in the dark, is bombarded by the sound of women chanting something in Latin and suddenly finds herself awash in the uncontrollable urge to rub herself the right way. Mom and dad visit the next day, only to find their baby girl still flicking the Hell out of the ol' "bean"! Though why she's still wearing her clothes is beyond me... As is expected, while mom goes off to call the family doctor for help, Demonic Danila makes explicit moves on big daddy, calling incest and a falsehood created by the church to ruin everybody’s good time. Fortunately he’s family value oriented enough or impotent enough (hence the whole ugly neighbor affair thing) not to give in to the crotch clutching solicitations of his nubile daughter and instead gives her the hardest backhand I’ve seen this side of a pimp convention! Keep that hand strong my brother; never let your hoes work the garden without your say-so!

Since this is a good twenty years before the Prozac Age, the doctor’s diagnosis of excess stress elicits a prescription for “a drive in the country” to call the sex crazed co-ed’s taxed brain. Sure enough, while Danni, Carlo, mommy Louisa and daddy Mario are cruising through the hills of… uhm… Italy… somewhere… they get a flat. While Carlo and Mario do the manly thing and try to play Mr. Fix-It, Crazy Dani wanders across the street… to an abandoned church… where there just happens to be a historian guy taking pictures of everything. Mr. Coincidental Exposition Character (C.E.C) educates our little heroine on the history of the structure: there used to be a group of cultists who crashed there and worshipped their dark god Baal. Baal was all about the sexin’ and sacrificin’, so his followers would whack babies and virgins in tribute to him, then follow it up with, you guessed it, dirty greasy pre-personal hygiene group sex. But, when the Christians started pouring over Europe like the scurvy ridden plague rats they are, they took the church for their own purposes, simply painting over the unholy images and making it more Christ friendly… because they’d rather try to cover up the evil deeds than put an end to the source of the problem… I’m sure a few hundred thousand young Catholic boys can relate to that.

And of course, because she hasn’t suffered enough religious deviance and psychotic episodes as of late, the Danila wafer goes exploring into the unlit bowels of the structure where she lapses into another round of craziness. This time she’s crucified by her timber lover and his cadre of albino demon dames, awakening from the nightmare in her parents’ house, screaming like a lunatic and suffering from a major case of stigmata. From here the movie turns into your standard Exorcist flick: physicians have tried nothing and are therefore out of ideas as to what to do, mom and dad turn to the church for help, Danila’s locked up in a convent and one of the world’s last remaining exorcists (who the family preacher just happens to know and who just happens to live nearby…) is called in to drive the demonia out of Danila. There’s an amusing break in the action when Dani uses her Satanic super strength to rip the steel bars from her window, leaps three stories to the ground and proceeds to run through a local village, screaming and banging her bloody hands on peoples’ doors while the local 5-0 chases her around, eventually re-capturing her and returning her to the nunnery to await exorcution. It really has nothing to do with the story and, aside from showing us that her possession apparently gives her superhuman powers, red contact lenses and the worse case of chapped lips this side of the Sahara, it has absolutely no bearing on the movie itself, it’s still a fun scene to watch!

Though the IMDB credits list the Exorcist as “Father Xeno”, I’m going to refer to him as Father Zima, because that’s honestly what I thought the crappy dubbed voices were calling him… not that I’ve ever been honest in my life, but it does open up the potential for a slew of bad spellchecker killing Zima jokes to follow. Az zuch, Father Zima vizitz Demonila, who’z vizited by Zatan, telling her it’z time to ztop the pointlezz thrazhing act and inztead zwitch tacticz to a more zeductive method, becauze there’z no better way to ztick it to the Man than to convert one of Hiz emizzariez over the dark zide. Okay, thiz iz juzt getting too fucking annoying to carry on with. Bezidez, I think my Word is about to zhutdown from all thiz bad zpelling, initiating it’z “Retarded Monkey Emergency Protocol” program.

At first, Zima’s about 2 inches away from his first pitched tent since childhood, but he breaks away from the lusty Danila (whose body heals back to it’s hottie status cuz it’s hard to seduce a guy with blood red eyes, busted lips and gaping wounds all over your body… unless you’re maybe trying to get David Cronenberg off), goes to his room and breaks out the ages old boner killer of flogging himself with the Hello Kitty o’ Nine Tails. You’d think Exorcists would be required to carry around an emergency bottle of salt peter in their anti-demon bags to avoid this kind of shit, right? Then again, since when does logic have a place in the church.

With his head back in the game (and his other head back in it’s stinky, hairy exile), Zima goes in for round 2! His resolve holds strong as he fires away at the possessed beauty with lots of Biblical verses spoken in Latin! Oooh, she’s reeling! He’s got her on the ropes! It looks like it’s all over but the… wait… no… what’s that?! Danila pulls out a steel chain! She’s whipping the padre with a steel chain! Why isn’t the ref doing anything about this! Ah, Zima may be down but he’s far from out, as the chanting continues! Destroyer Dani’s still lashing out with that chain, but it looks like the Father’s verbal abuse is wearing her resolve down! Yes, it looks like she’s going into convulsions now! There’s the foaming of the mouth (meh, I'd probably still do her)! Zima’s still chanting on strong and Danila’s down to her knees! It looks as if, yes, yes ladies and gentlemen, the Devil has left the building and Zima the Conqueror has snatched victory from the frothy jaws of utter defeat! Score one for the Father, the Son and the Holy Crap cuz this one’s going down in the record books! Stick a fork in it and roll the credits on this one kids, cuz it is done.

Overall, you can definitely see the Exorcist "influences" *cough*steals*cough* in regards to the heroine's broken family life, the attempts by doctors failing and leading into religious intervention, the moment of doubt by the wise old Exorcist and most notably the sexual interaction with a crucified figure... the difference of course being that Linda Blair's was smaller and didn't come to life... sure it's a stretch, but when you're grasping at straws for the better part of your life, this is what happens. The huge disapointment of EMHS though has to be the total abandonment of the bonerfide statue who started all of this in the first place! Now, some might try to read too much into the movie by saying the statue's simply a catalyst to a complete mental downfall for Danila. Sure, it could be considered as such, if not for one simple fact: Danila's physical appearance later, namely the eyes and numerous scars and wounds that appear and disappear from her body, change in such frequency that it's impossible to simply say it's "mind over matter". Don't try your fancy college bullshit here mister, because either way it's a complete waste of a cool story device (even the enter epicenter of the fucking story if you want to consider it) and it leaves you wondering for the last half of the movie why the friggin' statue's been completely ignored now! If this was a movie made today, you could almost excuse this, because you know there'd be a sequel (probably direct-to-video, but a sequel none-the-less) that would at least shed some light on the possessed art piece, if not center entirely around it's origin, it's ending or even just watching it come to life and bang inverted chicks for 90 minutes. It may, nay would be an awful movie, but at least there'd be some closure damn it and that's what I need in this post-9/11 age.

Too soon? Fuck you.

Either way, EMHS could've been so much more, but ultimately comes off as the Exorcist cash-in attempt it truly is. Gotta give it points though, cuz Lucretia Love (mom) and Stella Carnacina (Danila) are gorgeous. They're not even just "hot" or "I'd fuck her" good looking, but they're almost hypnotic in how beautiful they are. Plus, they're Italian women in a '70s exploitation movie, so you know they're going against all odds to come off as truly beautiful. If only my Wayback™ weren't in the shop... and if only I wasn't a hideous gargoyle... brings shivers to my man parts. Also, though the story's abandonment of the central plot point is disheartening and the rest of movie uninspired or original, the gore was groovy and the makeup, especially for the final "Zima vs. Devil Danila" sequence, kinda creeped me out. Not as good as it should've been, but far from a terrible experience.